How to Build a 7-Figure Business Using Facebook Ads

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing with you some of the marketing and advertising tactics that I use to grow my service based business to a seven figure company. I hope you can learn something from it and scale your business as well. Before we get into today's show though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp and try out for 90 days. This software is going to allow you to have a very transparent platform for, for your employees to see their payroll, to receive direct deposits, to get their W2s, to see all their benefits, see how their hours are racking up over the course of their pay period. And it's something that you definitely should be checking out. It's completely free for 90 days and after that it's one of the cheapest on the market and by far the best. Check it out. Go to gusto, that's G-U-S-T O.com Bootcamp to get that free trial. Now, today I don't have any notes, but I'd gotten about three or four emails over the course of the past week or so of new listeners that really hadn't listened to. I don't expect people to listen to the past 200 some odd episodes to kind of get my story and things like that. And I'm not going to necessarily share my story, but the theme of these questions was how did I grow my landscaping business specifically to where it is now? And so how did I grow it over the past several years to become a seven figure company? And what marketing tactics specifically did I use to get leads? And so some of you have heard me say this before. I've talked about this a lot on landscape business course because landscape specific, I talk about it very specifically in our Pro plus group, which is a small group of landscapers, landscaping companies that I mentor. And very specifically in terms of the fact that I really feel like I've grown my business, my landscaping business on the back of Facebook ads. And so, so many people look at Facebook ads as a great tool for selling online things, e commerce, et cetera, I feel like regardless of what business you're in, if it's done correctly, if it's targeted correctly, if you tell a story correctly, that you can make online marketing an incredible tool for your business. Now, I understand that Facebook ads are getting more expensive, that they are becoming more and more cost. They're being priced the correct way now, whereas even a few years ago they were quite a bit cheaper. So I've used Facebook ads for several ways for my online course. I've used it before, I've used it for my landscaping business. I've used it for other people that I've helped run their Facebook ads in probably five or six different industries. Everything from chiropractic to a pet store, like a whole bunch of stuff. And so I kind of have been able to play with a bunch of those different ways of testing different things and all that and sort of figure out what works the best. And so I'm by no means the expert at Facebook ads, by no means, nor online or SEO. But I'm just going to talk today about what I used to. And if you're listening to this, five years down the road these things might be obsolete, they might be commonplace, they might be, maybe they're even wrong in five years. But I'm just gonna tell you, the things that I've done on Facebook ads and the ways that I've used it to grow my service based business that's completely offline. We literally cut grass and cut trees and things like that. It's very physical, tangible world. And so for a lot of people, they feel like their store, their business, their practice, their services aren't necessarily marketable online simply due to the fact that they offer physical goods. They have a store location and they are geographically restricted to a certain area. And so I feel like Facebook ads have been a huge tool for us. And the reason is because of the targeting aspect, you're able to geographically. So in your area, figure out who you're going to mark against. So that's number one, geographic targeting. Number two is demographic, I think like age, do they own a house? Like all the different things that you can target on Facebook are very powerful. That's the demographics. The harder part is psychographics. And that is another third way to target your demographic or the people you're trying to go after. Your market, your target market is number one from the geographic. Like how are you trying to cover the whole world? Are you trying to cover the US? Are you trying to target your county or the 5 mile radius around your shop? What is your geographic? You want to nail that down first, then you want to nail down your demographic. What's the age of your ideal customer? What are the spending habits of your ideal customer?

Do they own a house? Do they not own a house? Do they have kids? Do they drive a certain type of car? Do they go certain places down Demographic information about your target market, psychographics, again, these are the things that they like, the things that they don't like, the things that, the way that they perceive the world. Are they Democrat, are they Republican, what type of, what's their psyche, what are their thoughts, what's their thought process like? And so in order to have a really good target market and to really have a really ideal customer, something you're really going after, you want to get very narrow in terms of who you're going after. And so I realized that in my business, landscaping, that we are ideally, we're really going after the baby boomer generation. A generation is now getting older and is coming to the place where they physically cannot mow their lawn. Or two, they're so involved in their career, which is now a mature, you know, they're in the most mature time of their career, 60s, 60 year olds that are making a lot more money. And at that moment in time, they should not be mowing their lawns. They should be focusing on their career, they should be focusing on their grandkids. And so that's my target market. The people I'm really going after is the people that, number one, they cannot do the services that I do. Like physically, they can't. They have a leg injury or there's something that they cannot do physically. If they're on a steep incline overlooking the ocean, they physically should not be able, should not be out there pulling weeds or doing services on that property. So that's the first person I'm going after, the person who cannot physically go do it. The second person I'm going after is a person that really should not be doing it because they have better things to do with their time. So instead of paying someone, instead of doing the lawn themselves, they should pay someone. $200 an hour is still less than what they make. And so as long as they can sub out that work to a service that will do that service for them, it's better for them that they go make four, five hundred dollars an hour doing a consulting gig or running their businesses, or in their practice as a lawyer or a physician or whatever they might be doing, because in that time of their life, from 50 to 65 is the most, they're making the most money in their career, and it's the most mature time of their career and they should be focusing on that. And so when I do Facebook ads, I'm looking at those three things, the demographics, the geographics, and the psychographics of my target market. And how do I penetrate them and so when we do Facebook ads, we are targeting everyone from 45 years old and up in our market, in our target area, our geographic location. And then what we do is we try to make sure that we get very specific targeting and allow the text and images to, to correlate with that target market. So for example, if I'm gonna go after people that are over 65 years old and I'm gonna target females, there's a really good chance that a lot of them are grandmas. And so I'm able to say something in the text and I'm able to show something in the picture that would indicate that this ad is built for them. Because if I say in the title, being a grandma is a full time job, you know, allow us to take care of your landscaping so you can spend more time with your grandkids. Like that's something that speaks to them because it's targeting them. We are in their geographical location, demographically, we are targeting the fact that they're grandma. And psychographically we are targeting the fact that they want to spend time with their grandchildren, thereby they should sell, allow us to sell them services so they can spend time with their grandkids. And so there's so many different ways to do that, but basically in our market, I'm always targeting people 45 years old and above. The reason for that is because again, two reasons. One, they physically aren't going to be able to do it. Two, they have come to the point in their career where they're going to make more money doing their other thing than trying to worry about the lawn care landscaping themselves. And so when it comes to Facebook ads, online marketing, things like that, there's two different ways I look at it. Number one is figure out how many leads I can get. And basically, when you're talking about online ads, a lot of times you're talking about clicks, you're talking about how many people get to your website. The second part of that is how then do I get them from my website to actually just contacting me? How do they actually become someone that not just clicks on my website and is there at my website, but actually somehow contacts our office in order to set up service, set, set up an estimate, et cetera? That's the second thing I'm looking at and really tracking. The third thing I'm looking at is then, okay, once the estimate has been given, once that initial contact has been made with that customer, what's the type of conversion that to actually a paying customer? So three steps. Number one is Click number two is just getting them to contact. The third one is conversion. So click contact, conversion. Those are the three things you're writing this down. These are the three different levels of an online marketing campaign for me is click and then I'm looking for them to contact us, and then I'm looking for the conversion. And so at each one of those stages there is a percentage of fall off. So only like 1% of people that see your ad. So like 1% might actually click on it. Then of the people that get to your website, you know, is that 20% of people that actually contact you? And then of those 20% of people that contact you, what percentage maybe 40% are you converting to a paying customer? And then you gotta look at, okay, how many people I have to contact or how many people do I have to reach in order for one person to click? And then how many people do I have to have click in order to get one person to contact me? And how many people do I have to have contact me in order for one of them to convert? Then what I do is I figure out what that conversion cost is, how much money did I have to pay to get all those people to see it and all those people to click on it, all those people to contact me, and then finally someone to convert. What's the cost of that? It's also called the customer acquisition cost. But what does it cost to get someone to click on the website, contact us, and then convert into a paying customer? And then the throw up that you have to decide because so many people just kind of feel like putting money into online marketing is like putting money into a black hole. They see like there's some value, they see some clothes clicks, they see some likes, they see some shares, but they don't actually see results. And a lot of times the reason for that is because they're just putting money in, but they're not tracking each of those three steps. And they don't know what their customer acquisition cost is because of that. And they don't know what their lifetime value of that converted customer is. So I know that the average customer, converted customer to my company makes a certain amount of money per year. Let's just say, for example, it's $5,000. So that $5,000, then there's going to be a profit margin. Let's say it's 20% of that. So 20% of that $5,000 that the average customer is going to give my business, that $5,000 of that is 20% margin. So let's say $1,000 profit is going to be per customer that converts. All right, now I have to ask myself the question, how many people am I going to have to get to click and then to contact and then to convert, and how much is that going to cost me? Because as long as theoretically the customer acquisition cost is $1,000 and the lifetime, or, sorry, the lifetime value of that customer is 5,000, and I have a 20% margin and I'm making a profit of $1,000 in that customer, technically speaking, theoretically speaking, as long as the customer acquisition cost is less than $1,000, I should continue to spend money on that marketing campaign. Theoretically speaking, there's other variables involved in terms of indirect cost, et cetera. However, that's how you have to think about it. Click, contact, convert. You have to know your numbers for each one of those steps in order to determine whether or not a campaign is worth running. And so some of the things that I would take directly to Facebook ads, Instagram ads, whatever you're talking about, YouTube, pre roll, things like that, online, all the online marketing game is, I think, number one, it's very important to be authentic. And you've heard me talk about authentic marketing before. And if you look at all the marketing I've done on Facebook ads over the course of about three years that I've built my landscaping business, it's changed at the beginning. It's very different than the way it is now. And the way it is now is just so much different in the way how many variable of ad sets we have, how many variable of creative we have versus what I did at the beginning. But what my point to that is, is be authentic to you. So when I was just starting out and I was the only employee of the company, I was marketing in a very different way. I was marketing in that I was really pitching the fact that I was going to be the owner. I was going to be on their property every single time. They were never going to have a middleman. When they called the office, they're going to get me and that person, me. It was also going to be on their property. The same one was going to be collecting their check, the same one that was going to be doing the estimate. And so I was selling the fact that they were going to have the same person for all their communications and all the services being performed. So none of the big companies could compete with me on that. And I was also using the fact that I was young. I would talk about me going through college and saving up for college, using lawn care and so using that aspect, me being a young entrepreneur, that whole aspect of it I really emphasized on because that was my truth. And so I find a lot of people when they go online and they start marketing their services, they market in a way that they've seen other companies, company's market or brand or they've seen other telemarketers use phone calls, scripts in a certain way. So that's the way they do it. And they just forget that they have to be true to you. And you might see your competitor the way that they do their Facebook ads, the way that they do their online marketing, the way they do their website and you figure out that that's the way you have to do it. But if they're a thousand person company and you're just starting out, you are not going to compete with them in the way that they are trying to touch the customer. You have to come from the angle that they cannot come to. And that is personalization, customization that the customer is talking directly to the owner. And so that's what I did when I first started. That's the way I used it. That was the story I was telling. Fast forwarding to now, they are never going to contact there's customers that I don't know and they don't know me and they've never seen me or talked to me. And so now it's no longer building the brand or the story on Facebook ads or on the website about me and about my story and about me starting the business. And the differentiating factor being that they get to talk to me all the time because they just don't. And so there's different stories that we're telling now. It's about professionalism, it's about the team, it's about the awards we won, it's about the diversity of our background, it's about the mission that our business is on in the future and how they play a part in that as the customer. And so now some of the tactics that we've used this year include doing a video directly to the camera with literally just my face or someone else and showing them behind the scenes in the business. And so for example, we did these Facebook ads and in our Pro plus group I showed the nine ads that we ran this spring and we changed the creative, which is the text and then the picture and the video. We changed every single week on those nine ads. And, and that's basically the way we grew. Now we've turned off the ads cause we have so many leads we can't Stay up with it. We can't staff enough for it. We don't have enough office people to stay up with the leads. And so we've stopped our marketing. But every single year, we've done a few weeks in the spring where we just do a lot of marketing to kind of get awareness, get a ton of leads coming in, and really it sets us up for the entire year for growth. And so this year, like I said, just a video camera to my face, showing behind the scenes, showing the office, showing the people in the office, showing the people that they're going to be communicating with over the Internet. Once they click get a quote, they're going to be able to have a face. The names that they are tech, they're emailing or texting or, you know, calling about their services. They're going to see all the office staff because I'm going to show them. I'm going to show them interacting, and they're going to see the behind the scenes, very powerful being able to show them, like literally behind the scenes of your business, how it operates, how it runs. So I took my camera out, I have like a GoPro, so it's nice and smooth, has stabilization or whatever. And what I do is I do under a minute. So that way it can go on Instagram. So anything under a minute on Facebook ads can also be shown on Instagram. That being said, again, you want to make sure you know where your target market is. I know my target market is not going to be on Snapchat, so there's not a whole lot of reason for me to go there right now for. For mowing and landscaping services. Facebook is gonna skew to a much older audience. And so that's why I'm focused on that as my primary method of advertising is because Facebook is an older audience than Instagram's younger, and Snapchat is younger than that, and TikTok and things like that. It's all of a younger audience. And so we are again, focused on the geographic, demographic and psychographics of our ideal customer. And they tend to be on Facebook. And so I'm showing them behind the scenes. I'm showing them why we're better. And I want them to see the faces behind the interactions they have with us online. And so I think a valuable part of doing Facebook ads, or whatever you're doing online on your website, which I'll get to in just a second, a big part of it is showing the things that your competitors are afraid to show or not showing or trying to hide. So you know, competitors in our market, they don't like to show like where their trucks are parked or their office staff or like their, their team meetings or their cluttered office space. They don't like to show that. So what I do is I pull out a phone, I pull out my GoPro and I show them the office staff. I show them the behind the scenes. I show them our meeting place for our team. I show them where we hang things up on the wall. I show them. I did a video. It was like seven in the morning before everyone had showed up. I kind of did a. It was like sunrise. It was really nice doing like a video, just like a walk around of our shop and of our trailers and out next to the road. And they, because they would have driven by that shop, they would instantly realize that's exactly where our shop was. They drive by there all the time. And it's very powerful when you're actually targeting a local geographic area because they're so used to seeing Facebook ads or online ads that are about Pepsi and Apple and all these big brands that they don't actually have a physical connection with, but versus you, who they can actually like. Oh, I drive by that all the time, or I've seen their trucks before or I've seen their sign, but now I actually get to see the behind, like behind in the back of the shop in the video. And so it's very powerful actually. And I feel a lot of people miss out on Facebook ads or these other mediums of online marketing because they feel like it's only for the big brands, it's only for brand awareness when it can really become a direct marketing source like direct leads, direct response. If you're gonna make your ad direct response, where want a response from the ad, you have to tell the customer what you want them to do. So on ours, I had the video. We changed out the creative with pictures, mostly videos and behind the scenes and things like that. But we're always very clear in the text portion of what we want them to do. So for example, we might have a question that says, tired of mowing your lawn? Question mark. Number one, click get quote number two, fill out the form. Number three, get your estimates to emailed to you within 24 hours, no appointment needed. That's literally telling them what to do. Look, you got to click this picture. Then you're going to fill out a form and then you don't need to do anything. We're going to get an estimate to you. And so making it very clear to the Customer. What's going to happen on that Facebook ad is very important because this is the second part of, I feel that we have drop off and that is we talked about clicks. And all I've been talking about so far has been how do you make sure people click on your ad? How do you make it appealing? How do you make sure it's video or content or text or. Or an offer that they want to click on? That's number one. Click, right? Second thing, convert. Sorry, sorry. Contact. This is the biggest part of falloff that I find you're actually losing money on, and that is contact. So people have clicked on your website, you send them to a webpage and they don't ever contact you. And if you're doing direct response, if you're in the business of actually getting someone to try to get you to. You want someone to pick up the phone and call you, or you want them to fill out a contact request form or an estimate request form or, or contact form online on your website, that's direct response. You're wanting an action. You're not just doing this for branding. You're not just doing this for awareness. You actually want people to call you. You want this to ring the register. You want people to click and pay and buy now. And if you're wanting that, you've gotta focus on not just the click. Cause that's kind of easy. Really. That's easy. I get a lot of clicks and Facebook will push things in front of people and you'll get clicks. And there's a whole bunch of ways to measure that. Whether or not it's relevant, whether or not people like it, share it, interact with it, click it, watch it, et cetera. That's easy. That's actually an easy part. You get a lot of information on that. What I find a lot of small business owners on a lot of small business owners fail in is once someone's clicked on the link that they're pushing, what is the experience of the customer? And a lot of times what you should be trying to do is get them to contact you. I find that people will send them to their website and then the customer's like, okay, I clicked on this ad that had a video and a nice picture and a nice text. And now I'm just at this random website and they have all these links and they have all these pages and articles and pictures and all this other stuff that they're looking at now. And it's like, okay, cool. But you never told them what to do, number one. And Number two, even if you did tell them what to do, when they get to that page, it's cluttered. So, for example, when I said, number one, click on the button get quote, because there's a button on Facebook ads, it says get quote, they click on that. Number two, I say fill out the form. Now, if I make it, when they click on get quote and it goes to a link or webpage that is cluttered and it's not very clear that the form is right in front of them, I will lose them after the click. I won't get them to contact me. And if you're trying to run Facebook ads or any sort of ad in general, like, I don't care if it's print or whatever, if you're trying to do direct response marketing where you're looking for a response, you're looking for them to contact you, you have to make sure that after they. They raise their hand and say, I want your services. That is, after they click on your Facebook ad and click get quote. Once they click get quote, you better make sure you're doing everything in your power to make sure they actually contact you. And so what you need to do is you need to make sure that contact form is at the very top of the page. If not, make it a lead page, or make it a very, very simple page with no other text, no other pictures, no other web links to other areas in your site. Make it a separate page that you just have that contact form. If that's what you're pushing them, you might just send it to a page where it's literally just your contact information and you're pushing them to call now. Or maybe it's when they click on that it goes to a page and they need to enter their email address in, and that's the way you're gonna contact them. You've got to absolutely get their contact information or make it to where they raise their hand and continue the contact, contacting you by clicking on call now or emailing you or doing something in order to get them to convert. And so I find the biggest part of this. And we could talk about then, how do you actually convert? And that's a whole other process. But we talk about automating the sales process on the last episode, and that's really what we were talking about. But number one, we talked about the click, right, getting people to click on your ad. There's just so much that goes into that. The creative, the text, how you position it, the offer that you make, what type of button you're using, what type of video? How long is it? What are you showing? Is it funny? Is it interesting? Is it pertaining to what you're actually pushing them towards on your website? Or is it, like, super random and they're gonna get confused? Like, all those things go in the click, then the contact part is super important. Do you have a contact request or do you have a estimate request form at the very top of your page? Is it above the fold? Is it clear? Is it easy to fill out? Is it fast to fill out? Because when someone clicks on your ad on Facebook, they are not moving. They, like, Facebook did not send them out of their app. If you notice, there's just a page that floats up from the top, and then they see your website or whatever URL you're sending them to. They are literally that far away from returning back to their Facebook news feed. And so in order for them not to do that, you need to make sure that within the first two, three seconds of them seeing that URL that you're sending them to, that they are engaging with it. They're putting in their contact information, they're calling you, they're doing something. And if you're not catching them on the front top few inches of your website, that is on a mobile device. That is very important, your mobile experience. I have found so many companies. They do Facebook ads, they do Google AdWords or Google Ads, and they click to a webpage that is like a 404 and it's not found or it is super cluttered, and they're never gonna get a response on that. Or worse yet, the contact form that they want you to fill out at the very bottom of the page, and someone's gonna literally have to scroll to the bottom in order to contact you. Like, you're never gonna get direct response. And so, yes, you might get a bunch of clicks, and people are like, I have a great cost per click. It's like, great. But what did it actually cost to get someone to contact you then? What did it cost for someone to actually convert? All right, so These are the three Cs you have to know about direct online marketing. Direct response online marketing is the click, then the contact, and then the convert. And at that contact phase is what I feel. We lose so many people. We lose them because we don't make it very clear what we want them to do once they click on our ad. You've got to make sure your contact form is at the top. You've got to make sure that your mobile device, your website, is Optimized for a mobile device. 80% of traffic that's coming through a Facebook ad traditionally is gonna be through a mobile device. So if your webpage looks super weird or they have to like zoom in a whole bunch in order to see your form that you want them to fill out, there's no way that's gonna convert very well. And so I look at all three of those different angles and so many people contact me and say, well, you should talk about Facebook ads all the time. And yeah, I do it just like I spend a bunch of money, it doesn't work. These are the three different areas. You have to analyze every single one. Because if you any one of them are broken, you're not gonna get a good paying customer. If you don't have a good creative, you don't have a good text, you don't have a good video, you aren't making engaging content. You're never gonna keep people to click on your ad. You might have a relevancy score of 10, but if they are, cause everyone's loving your ad. But if you don't get to the second C, which is contact, and you make it very easy for them to fill out a form, call you right away, email, you make it very, very simple, make fast, within 10 seconds, they should be able to send that form out. If you fail to do that, you have the best ad in the world. But if you don't actually make it where it's easy to contact you, easy for them to submit information and make it at the top of your page, there's gonna be a problem there. And we have a whole different avenue of salesmanship and customer experience in terms of going from contact to actually converting that customer. But I wanted to focus on today, those are some of the things that I've used. Being authentic, face to camera, showing the behind the scenes, telling your story, and not trying to put on a front of how big you are or what you're just be true to who you are and what your truth is. And I truly believe that customers will come to you. The right customers will come to you. Because if you're faking and putting a front on as some massive company, you're gonna attract customers that are looking for that and they're gonna be disappointed. Now, if you're true to who you are and you're just starting out, you're gonna attract people that are looking to help the underdog, that are willing to put up with some of the inconveniences of working with a smaller business. But it's because that's who they support, that's who they want to support, that's who they want to succeed. And they're going to buy into your story. So be true who you are, be true to who you are and then make sure that once they click, they actually contact you. And that's what will lead to a converted customer. I hope that helped. Those are the three Cs of direct response, marketing or online. You can listen to Mike Andes on the Business Boot Camp podcast. Until next time. Be great because nothing else pays.