How to Use Facebook To Dominate This Spring - Ep.22

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to landscape businesscourse.com podcast. This is episode 21 and we are going to go full out tactical today and talk about how you can use Facebook to increase business this spring and how to take back market share from your competitors in lawn care and landscaping contracts. So a lot of times from course members who are members@landscapebusinesscourse.com or, or just from people who listen to the podcast, I get this question a lot and especially from those in the lawn care industry. A lot of times in the industry, the lawn care landscaping, we aren't super tech savvy. We can create the website and things, but sometimes the marketing, digital marketing asset can kind of go over our head. So I wanted to give a very baseline, beginner kind of addition or model to follow when using Facebook. There are many ways to use Facebook effectively in our industry and we're gonna go specific lawn care landscaping today, obviously. But I wanna talk about two of the ones that are simple and yet very, very effective and cost effective when you talk about your Facebook strategy. So you can just throw ads out there and literally like boost posts on Facebook for 20, $30 and let people see your post more in your local area. That's one way of doing things, but it's not very targeted, you know, especially if you're just randomly boosting a post to a bunch of people in your area, you're gonna get 18 year olds, 14 year olds, you're gonna get, you know, all myriad of people in your area that really aren't even potential clients. Like they're not even in your target market. And so what Facebook allows you to do so effectively and really, in my opinion is the best priced and the best, most accurate way of marketing digitally is as of right now. That will change in a year, 2, 3, 5, like it changes all the time. But right now at 2017, January 2017, Facebook is an incredibly effective way, both cost effective and the way to target and really narrow down your audience. Absolutely the best. And so that's what I want to talk about today. Just two of the strategies that I want to share with you. So first of all, you do need to go to business.facebook.com and that's where you kind of have to set up a management account for your business and for your ads. So once you create an ad, I could spend an entire day on how to make the ad pictures, videos and you know, what your headline should be. But what I want to talk about today is which is way more important in my mind because all the other stuff you can just YouTube that how to make an effective Facebook ad and things like that. But like strategy wise for our industry, what should you be doing? Okay, so targeting is anything when you are narrowing down your audience. So instead of just let's say you could, you could just narrow down your audience to let's market to everyone in my area within 10 miles. So that might be like a hundred thousand people or you know, 200,000 people. And it's gonna market to all of those people. Now what you could do though is for the lawn care and landscape industry, we could care less about anyone. Like our target market, most of them are gonna be 60 plus, let's say 50 plus just to be safe. Now that's gonna cut that number literally by five. And so you're like now you might be down to 20, 30,000 that you're gonna be targeting in your area. Then you can still go further than that though. Like you can base it upon net worth. You can target just certain people with certain net worths and based upon their net worth and their area, you can show them different ads. So that's the power of Facebook. But two strategies I wanna talk to you today aren't so obvious in the way they set up Facebook. And if you are a pro, you're gonna think these are pretty elementary. But I do wanna, if you haven't used these before, you're gonna wanna use them in spring 2017. I guarantee you you will see results the number one way, and I like to call it taking back the customer. And some people would say you're robbing customers. I like to say taking back the customer. And what this is, is essentially you're trying to market to the fans of other competitors, other lawn care landscaping businesses. So what you can do is in the interest part of the, of the targeting the retargeting aspect for your Facebook ad. Once you've created a campaign and you made the ad like picture video, that you start trying to find an audience. You start targeting an audience in the interest category. You want to go under the page like the Facebook pages that they like and start entering in all your competitors pages, especially the ones that have a larger.

Like count. So if you go to your competitors Facebook pages, look at the ones who have lots of likes, then put in their Facebook pages as your audience. Essentially you are able to market to people who probably use lawn care and landscaping services and maybe they aren't fully satisfied with their provider and so they still like their page though, cause they just always Have. And so you can now market though to that person at the most critical time. That's in the spring when we're trying to get these maintenance contracts, you know, February, March, April, May. And so this is incredibly effective if you want to take back your customers. If you're losing customers, you can market to them again, try to get them back on. Another thing that's so powerful is you can take market share. This is literally you're going after the fans of your other, your competitors. And some people are against that. I think that it's great because, well, obviously you're going to get more business, but you're going to the people who might have liked their page and been a customer but now are not fully satisfied. They now are given another option and you're able to get in front of them, them. These are warm leads. Okay, These aren't hot leads. We're gonna get to that in a second. But warm leads are ones that they've already demonstrated. They like the industry at least, or at least they've done business with your competitor. And so they're a great lead to follow up on. And so we're kind of call them a warm lead. So that's one way to target in Facebook ads. Another way, number two, the second thing we're gonna share today, and that is when you import your own customer database. So if you've been in business four or five years, you might have 2,3000 emails, all the estimates you've done. And remember, every time you pick up the phone, you should be trying to get their email address to put it on your list so you can market to them. But this is another way to do it. And in Facebook you can import your entire database. And what Facebook will do is take all those email addresses and if there's any pairs between those email addresses and accounts, Facebook accounts, you can actually market to just those people. So let's say for instance, you have 2,000 customers in your database with their email address. You import all of those into Facebook and let's say 500 of them have a Facebook account associated with that email. Now you're going to be getting your message because you're going to target to just these people and show your ad to just these 500 people. You're going to be getting in front of very hot, hot leads. This is what I call hot leads. Because you have done business in some way, shape or form with them in the past. You might have done a one time project, you might have just done an estimate, but in one way shape or form, they have seen your trucks, they've seen your people, they've shake your hand or at least been on the phone and you got their email address. So they've had contact with you before. And so this is the highest form of a hot lead that you can have when it comes to Facebook, in my opinion, because they've given you your email address and, and so what you can do is import them into Facebook and now you can market to these people as if they've left and perhaps they've done a one time product. Like if you have it segmented in your email, all your email database. If you have it segmented in like the people who used to be maintenance contracts but they stopped, or the people who used to be.

Did like a one time job in the past, you can market them differently. So for instance, if you have a thousand people who you have done estimates for but never accepted, you could create an ad that says something like ever reconsidered mowing your lawn? Or something like want to take back your weekends question mark. So like something like that would work for people that didn't, you didn't estimate for, but then they decided, you know, do it themselves or something like that, take someone else. Or you could target people that you did a one time job for and you could target them for a spring cleanup and make sure the ad reflects that. Or you could try to get them on a maintenance contract and say your ad could literally say we enjoyed working for you, what about your lawn? And try to get them on a mowing contract starting in the spring. And so there's so many different things you can do. People who left your service, you can market to them in a different way. But what I want to talk about today was just those two strategies. Number one, to take back clients from your competitors and gain market share and take away the customers from your competitors. And number two is to take your existing database and really use them. These are the people who you're gonna be paying the lowest customer acquisition cost for because you already have a hot lead. They're gonna be people who have already seen you, already recognize your logo, already recognize your brand, and hopefully they've had a good experience with your company. So you don't even have to go over that hurdle in the sales process. They've already seen you. And so when you pop up in their news feed, guess what? They've already know like and trust you. Now you're reminding them. And maybe a few times over the course of the next few months, you're consistently in their News feed on Facebook advertising your mowing packages and your fertilization or your spring cleanups. And guess what? They're going to choose the people that they have a relationship already built with. And that's why I call them hot leads. So those are the two strategies. Number one, when you're targeting to make sure that under the interest part of the targeting on Facebook, on the campaign, you want to select the people that have liked your competitor's Facebook page. So you're essentially going right after their customer base and you're gonna see if you can serve them better. So those are the two tips for today. I promise you if you use those in 2017, in the spring, as we go into the mowing season especially, you're gonna see great traction and your customer acquisition cost is gonna be greatly improved. What's so great about Facebook is you can literally spend a couple hundred dollars and get a really good idea of if it's gonna work for you and be able to test different types of ads. Whereas for print marketing you're gonn if you want to get some, you know, a large customer base or do a whole bunch of flyers or have to pass them out and pay for labor like you're gonna pay quite a bit more to test out a marketing piece. I love Facebook ads because within a few days I spend a hundred bucks and I can get a pretty good idea if a certain type of ad or a certain picture or a certain caption works really good. And so definitely try it out. I would try if I were you to spend a hundred dollars per ad do on five different types of ad, like five different types of pictures or video, however you wanna get creative with that and with five different types of heading and go after five different markets. What I mean by markets is like different net worths, different. Go after your competitor's Facebook page, go after your current existing database, like make five of those $100 a piece, do each one for one week and see how it goes. So spend 20 bucks a day or whatever and see how it goes. I promise you that $500 will return a whole lot more customers and a more leads and a whole lot warmer leads than any sort of cold calling or print marketing will do. So that's it for today everyone. Landscapebusinesscourse.com check it out. I've changed the format for the winter on the webinar. Now when you access it, you get instant. You can watch instantly last week's webinar right away so you don't have to wait anymore for the once a week webinar, you can just go onto landscapebusinesscourse.com put your email address in and it will immediately give you access to last week's webinar, where I talk about the three marketing methods that I've used to grow my business in the past three years to $100,000 in revenue each month. We talk about, like, the five things that keep small businesses small. We talk about the role of the owner and how it should evolve with the business going from labor to office manager to estimator to CEO, and what needs to go throughout that process. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com that's it for today, everyone. Episode 21. I'm excited about where this show is going. Thank you for all the comments and the reviews and nice emails I've been getting, and I've been trying to answer all of your questions as they come in. Again, thank you so much. Mike Andes signing off.