The Marketing Playbook Required to Be in the Top 1%

If you have a home service business and you want to get more customers, this is the video for you. I'm going to share the secrets that I use for marketing and advertising to grow Augusta Lawn care to over 150 locations around the world.

The very first way to get customers is completely free, and that is using your Google business listing. This is what it looks like when you go and search on Google. These all the top are from Google listings. All of this down here is search engine optimization. This is. That's what really comes to play down here. If you've got a lot of clicks, if you have a great web design, things like that, you can see here. This is our location locally. I see in three places and I haven't paid for any of these. I see it right here as the number one spot for Google listings. I also see on the map because I'm a physical address and I also rank well on native search. So when I look at Google listings, there's a few things I want to focus on. Number one, look at how many reviews we got. 492 Google reviews. Now, that's been over the course of 10 years. If you're just getting started, you've got to get above 30 as quickly as possible. I literally don't care if you need to do services for free just to get reviews. Get at least 30, and you'll likely usually get on like the first page or two of Google just by getting 30 Google reviews. It's completely free. It's not going to cost you anything. But we have 500. That's why we're at the top. Another thing you can do to make sure you rank well on here is have an actual address that's verified by Google. That's a physical address inside of your service area. So even though we're called Augusta Lawn care of Whatcom County, I have a Bellingham address that has a real mailbox and I'm able to get mail there now. It's a pain in the butt to get verified on Google listings when it comes to addresses. Back in the day, we could literally get away with just getting a post office box or a UPS store box. Now they're requiring video evidence being submitted to Google to get an address verified. However, it is worth going through the trouble of getting this verified because you can notice here I probably have 80 to 100 competitors in my market. I'm one of just a few that are actually on the map for Google. Google listings and Google Maps are now the same thing and they're integrating them a Lot. So having an address that's verified on Google, very important to ranking. Well, not only here, but it will be taken into account when it comes to native search. But if I can be the number one go to on this map, huge win in terms of being able to get more leads for exactly zero cost. And when it comes to optimizing your Google listing, you're going to want to do several things. First off, make sure you have a bunch of pictures. For example, let's go and open up the actual location here for Augusta Lawn Care. And you can see here if I go to all the images. Every single day we're posting images of all the different work sites that we have. And we're showing our trucks, our trailers, our employees, our uniforms, our branding is being showed inside the images. And we usually do this at least three times a week across all of our locations. This is going to be giving more information and data to Google. And guess what they love, they love more data. So give them pictures. Give them also information about your business. So when you're editing your Google listing, there's going to be all sorts of information about your services, your reviews, any updates you might have, photos you might have, and an overview. This overview is going to include like what areas of the county do you service, what cities are, what services do you offer? If you don't keep this updated, it's going to be really bad because what can happen is customers can actually recommend what services you offer. Recommend what, what service areas you're actually being able to do services in. And you don't want those going to Google. You want to stay on top of this at least on a monthly basis to make sure that all of your relevant information in terms of services, service areas, your contact information, all of that is updated and relevant. I've seen times where, where people leave this alone for 6 or 12 months. All of a sudden this will get banned simply because someone changed their address or their phone number doesn't line up correctly, making sure their hours are actually correct. Getting banned on Google listings is a pain in the butt. To get it reactivated, it can sometimes take a month or two and many, many attempts to Google to try to get it reactivated. So check on it every single month to make sure everything's updated. And you can continue to print these free leads. Cause this cost you again, absolutely nothing.

So another way that you can get customers without spending any money on marketing is Facebook groups. In your local market, in your city, in your town, in your neighborhood, many Facebook groups exist. And it doesn't cost Anything to be part of them. And the whole nice thing about Facebook groups is everyone's local. And so immediately you have a lot of trust built up with the community simply because you're verified that you live in that area. And there might be 20 or 30 people inside of a neighborhood group. There might be five or 600 in your city's group, There might be a hundred parents inside of your high school's, your kids, high school group. Whatever it is, get inside those Facebook groups. It doesn't cost you anything. And because you already have the trust built up of being a local community member, you can pitch your services and do it in a delicate way. You know, don't tell them like right off the rip, I'm trying to do my mowing. My mowing service, like come buy for me, it's $40. Like don't go that direction. Introduce yourself. I live in such and such a neighborhood. Make it really local because that's what that community, what makes it really different. Remember too, when you're first getting started, we don't need customers paying right off the rip. Instead they can pay with a review, a referral or an upsell. I would literally be happy to do services basically for free if I can get a Google review or a Facebook review. Or better yet, just ask them. He hey, if you're in this Facebook group, I'll willing to do x, Y and Z service and then just review your service here. On this Facebook group you might get 20 or 30 other people to see that and two or three of them need the same service and all of a sudden you got a great referral. So I can get a review, I can get a referral, or I get an upsell. Which means even on those Facebook groups you might say, hey, I'll trim everyone's bushes for free. And then when you do that, you're like, oh man, I can get them for weeding service, mowing service. They also need some mulch installed and their gutters they need cleaned out. There's an ability to be able to just take entry level gateway service and then upsell other services to customers. So when you're first getting started, use that Facebook group to get things besides money, reviews, referrals and upsells. There's actually a feature inside of Copilot where when you're at a customer's property, you can really quickly upsell them a whole bunch of different services and send them a text or an email automatically with a tap of a button.

If you got a lot of guts, you can do Door knocking. Now, door knocking is not for the faint heart. It's very difficult to walk up to strangers, houses knock on their door, know that you are interrupting them and try to sell them your services. But ultimately you're going to have the highest amount of response because they cannot not respond to you. Keep in mind, when you're doing door knocking, only about 40, 50% of people are actually going to be home. And so I recommend keeping something like a door hanger that you can put on the door if they're not home. And so it's not a waste of time walking up their house, waiting there for 30, 60 seconds, looking around, doing nothing, like have something to be able to put on the door. At the very least, keep in mind you're only probably going to be able to get to 15, 20 houses per hour when it comes to actually knocking on the door because you have to wait for them to come answer it. Now, instead of being super salesy and try to sell them on something at the door, you could also just go a little more low key and just introduce yourself. Hey, it's Mike here. I started Augusta Lawn Care, do lawn care and landscaping the year. If you ever need anything, just want to give you my card. I'd love to be of service to you. That's great. They can close the door. Thank you, bye. And you're gone. It's not high pressure. Another way you can use door to door sales is simply introducing yourself when you have a customer in the local area in their neighborhood. So for example, hey, we're just down at Mr. Jones house down the street doing a property cleanup. You might have seen us driving by the last couple of days. Just want to introduce myself. If you ever need a property cleanup like Mr. Jones did, just reach out, let us know. And a lot of times if customer needs a service, they're just gonna be like, oh, actually, yeah, like why are you here? Could you give me a quote? Like, what would it charge to do my property? And so that's a nice easier way to do it. If you want to go high pressure sales, you can have a price and you can ask for the sale right then and there. Most people that I encounter with, it's just too much social anxiety and I don't blame them. It's very, very difficult. But ultimately it costs you one thing and it's literally the soles on your shoes. Like when people say boots on the ground, when they say, you know, got to do pound pavement, it's walking on these, this pavement right here on this sidewalk. And going through the rejection that comes along with door to door sales.

One way to get more leads without spending any money on marketing is building a referral or an affiliate program. Now, what you're going to want to do is go to other local businesses in your area and try to get customers from them. For example, this is Anytime Fitness. I happen to own this gym. However, you don't need to own the other businesses that you try to build a referral network with. For example, I could offer my members at Anytime Fitness a free lawn mowing over at Augusta Lawn Care. And if you don't own two business, that's fine. Go talk to a plumber or an electrician or a contractor or some other business that's somewhat adjacent to your home service. For example, you might only do bathroom remodels. Well, go talk to the people that install appliances because a lot of the people that are installing new appliances would love to have their bathroom remodeled. And you could offer their customers value. And if you offer their customers value, they'll want to actually give something to their customers because it makes them look good. So if you can make it a win, win, win for the customer, for the other vendor, and for you, then we got a winning formula. Now, when it comes to referrals and actually sharing the name of another contractor in a different service, for example, we don't do big construction hardscaping jobs at Augusta Lawn Care. We're not going to focus on paver patios, retaining walls, putting greens, etc. But what I'll do is I'll go give that referral to someone else. Now, here's a secret. If you're going to get a referral and give it to someone else, don't just tell them, oh, yeah, call so and so. If you really want to take advantage of it and build goodwill with other contractors that could also give you leads in return is ask the customer if they would like you to give the information, their information to the other provider. That way I can actually call up someone that I'm referring a paver patio to, like, hey, I got Mr. Jones here. Here's his phone number, here's their email, and they're looking for a paver patio. Give them a call. I told them I would give you their information. Now all of a sudden you've given them a really solid lead and they know it came from you. Because if you just tell the customer like, hey, yeah, go contact Billy Bob Landscaping. He'll take care of your paver patio. Well, they don't know whether or not that lead came from you or from Google or from seeing their trucks. And so if you want the goodwill attached to your brand new, make sure that the person that you're referring actually is getting the lead from you. And once you do that, once you build up that good rapport, what goes around comes around. They're going to give you leads back in return. Also, just recently at Augusta Lawn Care, one of our owners had such goodwill with another local landscaper in the area. They decided they were moving out of a certain area of town and they wanted to sell off their business. They didn't even promote it. They just went directly to the Augusta Lawn Care owner and said, hey, let's make a deal. And sure enough, they're able to get a great deal on all their mowing customers because they had a great relationship of referring away the different services that they didn't provide at their location. And so doing that and building that relationship leads to acquisitions. It leads to more leads coming from your competitors, and it leads to other competitors saying good things about you to customers, even if they don't give you a lead.

Another way to get customers if you're in a high traffic area is to hold a sign. Now, it's not fun to hold a sign next to the road in the blazing heat, but it can print customers. I've had it before. I get one to two customers per hour that I'm holding a sign in the right spot. So here's a couple tips. First off, make sure people aren't flying by at 80 miles an hour. Like being next to a really big highway. Not ideal. You actually want to be more like a shopping area or people are coming in and out, like the entrance to this mall. Perfect spot. Why? Because if they see my sign, they can pull in right next to me and I can actually get the quote information right away from them. So them driving 10, 15 miles an hour, very good. I have a spot for them to park, and I have my truck here presented for everyone to see as they drive in and out of the mall. It's a great way to get brand awareness. And then my sign is going to be drawing them to the attention of get a quote, Get a quote for mowing, get a quote for property cleanup, whatever service you're trying to offer your customers, and make the sign about getting the quote. And then your truck attracts the attention. And if you really got some nerves and you build, you know, up a little gumption, stand up on top of the truck, stand on top of the truck, stand on top of the Truck, do something to get people's attention and then get the sign to drive, the awareness for them to come park their vehicle next to you and actually get the quote information.

Now, if you don't have the guts to go and knock on people's door and actually talk to them, a way around that is to simply use door hangers. So for a door hanger, I just come up to the property right on there and move right on the next one. Now, there's a few hacks that you can use to make sure you get as many door hangers as possible, because ultimately it's all about the math. So being in a more dense area and neighborhood is going to allow you to hit more like 60, 70, 80, 100 plus different addresses per hour. If you're really spread out where you've got to walk two or three minutes between every single property, you might only get out 15 or 20 door hangers in an entire hour. So the math on that, once you know how many door hangers you got to put out per hour, you can actually run the math on is if you actually hired someone to just do these door hangers themselves. So if you paid someone $20 an hour, then you got maybe these cost like 10 or 15 cents a pop. So maybe a 10 to $10 in printing costs. Now, if you get like one lead per hour, $20 in labor, $10 in printing cost, $30 cost per lead is fantastic. So it's all about the math. How many door hangers can you put out per hour? And how many door hangers do you have to put out in order to get one new lead? Once you've figured that math out, you can completely scale this across your city. Now remember, door hangers are going to be super seasonal, which means they might work today, but next month not work if the demand for that service is no longer there. For example, I did core aeration right here. But I know for a fact that if I do corporation any time other than early spring or late fall, I'm just not going to get a good return. It's very seasonal. Same thing with direct mail and a lot of other services. Because people usually aren't going to want to use your services unless they have actual pain. So if the grass is growing, lawn mowing might be the one they want to think about. But if the grass is dormant, doing door hangers for any sort of lawn mowing is just not going to have a great return. Now, one way that we really like at Augusta Lawn Care to improve the chances of someone actually reaching out over these door hangers is you have the actual prices. We call this the instant quote on the back of the door hanger. So in addition to it having the front that's a little more design friendly on the back end, they can actually get the instant quote for bush trimming, leaf cleanup, weeds in the beds, if this is a property cleanup one. And then also we put any notes and a total actual dollar amount in order to do this one. For property cleanup specifically, you would have to have a marker or a pen and actually fill this in as you walk up to the front door. So this is going to slow you down, but your response rate is going to be higher. If we look at it from this purely this perspective is like if we're knocking on the door and talking to people, that's going to be our highest response rate. But we're going to have less deliveries per hour, less contacts per hour, less impressions, less. And then if we move down a little further, well, if we do instant pricing, it's going to take us a little longer to fill this out on every property as we walk up in terms of our property cleanup or a mowing estimate for their weekly and bi weekly price, any notes, etc. It's going to take us a little longer. So we're going to have greater impact, a higher response rate, but also less per hour that we're going to be able to deliver. And then you really want to go to the max. You would not have instant pricing and you just hit every single door as fast as possible. You use a scooter to just go as fast as possible and that's going to be a lowest response rate. But it's. You're going to have your highest volume, the number of people that you can actually go out and reach. So door hangers, great strategy. We built massive businesses inside of Augusta Lawn Care just off the back of door hangers. Just keep in mind you'll want to test different areas as well because one neighborhood might have no response door hangers, another area might have, you know, massive response. Keep in mind when you're hitting every single door with door hangers, you can also get around most no no trespassing laws because you're canvassing, you are not soliciting. If you're knocking on doors, that's soliciting. And in a lot of hoas and neighborhood goods, they're gonna have no soliciting allowed. But you can canvas which is hitting every single door with a door hanger. Yard signs are one way to also get more customers Now a couple things you want to be careful of. First off, they're really easy to steal and I've put up hundreds of door of these yard signs before and all of a sudden the next day I wake up and they're all gone. Also, they can start to look kind of trashy after several weeks and kind of not associate your brand with high quality. So a lot of times people will look at them and associate them with a lower quality service simply because they just start to look bad over time. And most high quality brands aren't putting a ton of yard signs out. However, ultimately I don't care what people think about me. I want to make more money and so if I can get more leads, get getting started. Let's go. Now when it comes to placement of these yard signs, a couple of things you want to keep in mind. Look how people are stopping right next to these yard signs. That's a great placement because when they're stopping they have to look next to stop signs. Four way stops and intersections, great place to put them and you can avoid getting removed if you just look for other places where yard signs are at and focus on those areas. Yard signs can also be used for if you do like a community project in a area like this and you maybe installed some plants or mulch, you can install some yard signs. Great way to get some publicity also after projects. So once you're doing a big job, ask the customer. Very rude. Ask the customer, hey, is it okay if I just leave this yard sign in your yard? And it's just like this project was completed by and it has your branding. Another way to be able to get those into a customer's property and see the neighbors all see it without it being removed by your competition.

All right, so we've already talked a little bit about having a Google listing. But even above that, when you're searching on Google is what we call the Google Guaranteed, also known as the Google Local Services program. Google Local Services, if you qualify for the program, you're going to show up right here at the top and have this Google Guarantee. Now this little check mark that says Google Guaranteed is telling customers and telling people that use Google, hey, if you use these providers that we vetted, made sure they're insured, we've done a background check on them. If you actually use them and they don't turn out to be good, there's like $100,000 that they can go after and go after Google for. And so this is very, a lot of awareness goes to this right now. And Google's pushing this a lot. They slowly roll it out over the course of a couple years in different markets. And I see them going to push this more and more and more. They start to add images, they start. They started to push it a lot more often because ultimately, if they just get a click. So down here, this is Google Ads, and we'll talk more about that later. Down here, they might get a $2, $3 per click. Here they might get 15, 20, 25, $30 cost per lead. But here's the thing. The difference between Google Ads down here, which we'll talk about later, and what we're talking about now, which is Google Local Services, is if someone clicks on my ad down here, I pay for a click. But here I pay for a lead. And I would much rather pay for a qualified lead than just a whole bunch of clicks. Cause clicks don't pay the bills. But if I can get a bunch of leads and then convert them into paying customers, we're off to the races. And so Google's obviously trying to make more money. That's fine. I need to get inside this program. In order to get into the Google Local Services program, you're going to have to do several things. First off, you're going to have to have a background check. You're going to have to have insurance, and you have to prove that you have general liability insurance. You're also, in most states, going to need some sort of certification beyond just a business license, like a contractor's license or a pesticide license, depending on your industry. It will require a different type of certification. And although it's a pain in the butt to qualify for, it also keeps a lot of competitors away from even being able to be in the program because they're not insured.

They are.

Background check, it would exist, but it wouldn't be good. And so ultimately, you might only have three or four competitors that are actually qualified for this program and will allow you to be able to get leads for very cheap. Ultimately, when it comes to the budget on Google Local Services, I would be willing to spend as much as possible because I can get leads for like 15 or 20 bucks, which is extremely cheap. However, if you have a lot of competitors in your area that also are trying to be inside the program, Google's got to distribute those leads to other people. Honestly, the worst part about Google Local Services is the fact that I can't pour more gas on the fire, which means if it's working well and I'm getting leads, I can't just Put more money and get more leads. There's a finite number of leads, and Google has to distribute those between all the people that qualify for the program. And so if I want to double my amount of leads, I can't just double my budget to Google Local Services. Usually they don't even come close to the budget parameters I set out. And I like this one the most though, because when you click on this, and if I was to actually click get phone number or call now, what's going to happen is I'm going to get a recorded phone call of this customer talking to my office. And so whether it be command center and Max AI talking and getting the lead information, or your personal offices, that's calling and picking up the phone, I'm going to get a recorded phone call of a customer getting service. Now, inside of the program, you're able to actually dispute leads that come in that are not inside your service area or for services that you don't offer. So if you're like, well, I do mowing, and then someone called clicked on here and they want concrete installation, like I don't do concrete, you can dispute it and get your money back. So really, you're only paying Google Local Services 15, 20 bucks, whatever it might be. It kind of ranges based upon your industry. But like, let's just say it's 20 or $25. Like if you're spending that for a very qualified recorded phone call, a lead, that's awesome, you're usually going to close like 50, 60, 70% of those once you meet them in person, versus just having someone click on an ad where you might convert them, they might ask for an estimate. Google Local Services. Very good. All right, so we've talked about Google listings where you're going to be able to put up your profile for free. Then we moved on to Google Local Services, which is at the very top of the search. Below that is Google Ads, where you're going to be able to run ads to customers that search certain keywords, and that's going to drive them to your website. So you're not getting a lead, but you are getting a click. Now, the best thing about Google Ads is the fact that you're actually going to have customers that have intent to buy, which means they are looking for lawn care, mowing, landscaping, painting, fence, building. Whatever service you offer, you're going to have certain keywords, which means you're only going to show up if they use a certain service name that you know you're going to be relevant for. So this is what it looks like on the front end. We've talked about Google listing, Google local services and Google Ads. Three completely different channels from Google. But then let's look on the back end what this is going to look like on the back end. This is a real live up to date account from Google Ads and this is what's currently being run from a location at Augusta Lawn Care. And you can see here the amount of impressions. 3,000 people have actually seen this advertisement. Okay. In the same one month we had a 5% click through rate, which means that 5% of the people that saw the ad, it was impression it was on their page, clicked on it, 21 people converted. Now you're not gonna get conversions unless you have a Google tracking code. And what we've done recently at Augusta is make sure everyone has what we call done for you ads, where they have the exact instructions to use Google Analytics to be able to make sure you actually know not just when someone clicks, but when they actually have submitted an estimate request form. And I'm gonna show you that in a moment. But we have 21 conversions. Let's do the quick math on this and find out what are we paying per lead? Because that's really what I'm trying to focus on. So I'm gonna take $899 was my spend for Google Ads this month. I'm gonna divide it by the 21 confirmed estimates that I received and I'm gonna show you how that was done in a second. So that's $42.80 approximately per lead that I am getting from Google Ads. Now if I can convert half of those leads into paying customers, I would have about an $80 customer acquisition cost. Let's break down the math on customer acquisition costs in just a moment. Let's look at the actual website because where we're tracking those conversions is very, very important. Once I put my information in, I actually get an instant price and I actually submit for an actual price from the website. It's only after I click submit on this page that it's actually going to track this as a conversion. Which means I'm actually basically getting a customer if they do these instant price forms from our site. But what's cool is when you are doing a tracking code on Google, I want to actually take them to a different URL. So when I click that submit button and I'm not gonna do it cause it's a live website, but if I click submit it's gonna go to a different URL like make a thank you Page, for example, saying just something like, thank you for submitting your information. Our office will get back to you within 24 hours. Something like that is fine. You're going to put your Google tracking code on that page. That way, anytime a user hits that page, we know they've submitted an estimate request form. Now, let's actually look at what this looks like on a funnel, because all things start and end with a great funnel. So if we look at this and we think of everything at the top of the funnel coming in as a click, this would be like what we just talked about, paying for a click from Google. In this case, it was like $5 per click. All right, so we had like $5 coming in here in order to get one click at the top of this funnel. Now, what we call this is our cost per click or CPC, and we've just found out that it's $5. But as we go in the funnel, not all clicks become paying customers. And so I like to think this is a filter. This is our conversion ratio.

All right?

What percentage of people that come to our site actually fill out an estimate request form that's going to give us our cost per lead? And we've already identified in this example, that's about $40 is our cost per lead. But that's not what we're really needing. We're needing paying customers, people that actually choose our service and actually give us money. So there's another filter. And this is where your close ratio comes into play. Your close ratio is what percentage of leads do you close and turn into actual customers? And that's where your customer acquisition cost comes into play. And in this case, let's just assume that our close ratio was, let's just call it 50%, which means half of the estimates that we send to customers get accepted. If that was the case, that would mean that half of these leads become paying customers, which means my customer acquisition cost would be $80. Not bad if I'm like 2 or $3,000 per year per customer. This is the breakdown of a cost per click, cost per lead, and customer acquisition cost. And knowing just the cost per click. Not good enough. Someone selling you on low cost per lead, also not good enough. It needs to come down to what am I paying per customer? And being able to track this is super important. Using Google Analytics.

All right, the next way to get more customers for your business comes from Mr. Marky Zuckerbuck.

We're going to go with that now. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, also known as Meta, is the Next way to get customers, see Meta, includes Facebook and Instagram. And I could care less. I just want money, I want customers. And so when we look at Facebook, the thing that we got to realize is that unlike Facebook ads, where people have intent to buy and they're actually looking for lawn care, landscaping and your services, over here we got Facebook, where people are simply looking for little pictures of babies and kittens. I can't draw a cat. There you go. That's what they're going to Facebook for, they're coming to Instagram for. And so the challenging part with Facebook and Instagram is that people do not have intent to buy. In fact, you are disrupting them. You are getting in the way of them looking for the things that they're wanting to find. Now.

Good books, by the way. All right, now we look at Facebook, a lot of times people make videos and they'll pitch their services to customers, et cetera. If you're wondering how to make a piece of content for Facebook, I'm gonna give you the actual method to do so. The reason this is important because unlike Google, where you're just doing keywords and it's text based, when it comes to Facebook, your creative matters. All right, so your creative matters. This is your picture, this is your video, this is your headline, this is the text that you use in your ads for Facebook. Very important. I recommend changing them out every seven to 14 days because otherwise, if people start seeing Your same A.D. 3, 4, 5 times, you literally start to become white space on this screen. Now, the whole goal is for them to stop scrolling. And if they've seen the same A.D. 10 times, they're just going to keep scrolling. And that leads me into the framework for the creative, which is first and foremost, we must have a hook. In other words, we need them to stop scrolling. And the number one way to do that for most home service businesses is to call out the customer and be like, hey, homeowners in this area, your service area or something that's going to call them out, hook them in. And so this is essentially get them to stop scrolling after the hook. Then we're going to have our meet. This is going to be where you can present your offer, you can talk about your services or whatever. And we're going to talk about in just a second, how to break up the meat section of your creative for the customer. The last thing is the CTA call to action. This is where you're going to tell them to click on something, call them to give you, tell them to give you A call, you're going to tell them to fill out a form. You're going to tell them to do something at the very end of your advertising. Now, the meat can be broken down into three distinct, different issues here. First we got to show the problem. For example, with mowing, this problem could be the fact that you don't have time on the weekend to go golfing or spend time with the kids. That's the problem. The solution usually, almost always is going to be hire us. We provide those services, we can take that off your plate. That's a solution. And then lastly, we're going to do a case study. This is where you can show your reviews. This is going to be where you might show video clips of a customer giving a positive testimonial about your service or sharing a before and after picture. Also a version of a case study. So creative, very important, change it up as much as possible. Have a hook meet and call to action. Here's how the meat is broken down and you can literally do all of this in one image. For example, a before and after picture that has a testimonial text of a customer saying good things about you and the problem they had before. And then the solution. All very good Facebook ads will crush, but they can also be an absolute money suck if you're not actually managing the creative and making sure you're actually tracking if the leads are hitting your page the same way that Google, we have a Google tracking code with Facebook, we have what's called a Facebook pixel. That same piece of code needs to be inserted on your thank you page. So when customers ask for a lead, we actually know, we actually know if they came from Facebook. Otherwise you could be pouring your money down the toilet. And Mr. Marky Zuckerzuk, whatever his name is over here making more moolah. Most of the time, if you're out working in the field, a customer's not gonna actually walk up to you and, and ask you for your information in order to be able to do business with you. Rather, they're going to be looking for a truck like this that's wrapped or painted for them to be able to get contact information like your phone number or go to your website or at least just know what your brand is. This is like a massive walking billboard wherever you go. This is a way to be able to get customers to be able to buy from you. Now, when it comes to the three step process to get a new customer, there's three things that have to happen. Number one, that's a find you. Then they have to recognize you, and then they can buy from you. And usually this is the steps that it follows. When you get more and more trucks rolling around, guess what? People are going to find you and like, oh, Augusta Lawn Care. If I had a white truck, they wouldn't know who was actually doing the lawn. They'd just be like, oh, they're doing great work. That's cool. But now, because they actually can find me, because I have to have my brand name, we're good. Then they usually go to your website, and that's where they need to recognize you. And that's why the truck needs to also be on my website page so I can actually recognize the same truck that I saw in the field. The same brand. Augusta Lawn Care. The uniforms, the guy that saw Moen in yellow shirts. Oh, it's the same. It's the same company. So I got to find recognize on my website. And then they can buy from you, but they will never buy from you if they don't first find you. And they're never going to be able to find you if you don't have a truck that's wrapped decal and has contact information on it. Now, the pricing on this can vary. Painting a truck can cost you anywhere from 1,000 to 3 or $4,000, depending on where you're at in the country. It's insane. The amount of change that goes from even just one state to the next. Also, to wrap an entire truck, you might be looking at again, 2, 3, $4,000 to wrap the entire truck. This truck, for example, we painted the front half, and then the back half is just the wrap. That allowed us to be able to paint the entire front for like three or four hundred dollars. And then the back half being wrapped allowed us to save money. But all in, we're still looking at like $1200 to get this thing painted and decal. And that's pretty low to a lot of places in the country where it's double or even triple. But I can promise you one thing. This alone will get you so many leads. And as you get more trucks and you grow your business, having these billboards rolling around town all day long is the number one way to make sure that customers start to see you everywhere. You get one or two of these trucks rolling around in the neighborhood a couple times a week, and all of a sudden everyone's like, oh, man, I just see you all over the place, all over the neighborhood. I go online, I see you on Facebook, I see your website. That's the kind of brand penetration you can get when you get great branding on your truck.

Another way to get customers is billboards and signage. Now, if you're just getting started, you might not be able to do this. I'm going to show you in a moment what you could do if you don't have much of a budget. But if you're getting shop space, I'm willing to spend a little bit more. If I can get a space where when I put up a sign and it's going to show it to hundreds, if not thousands of people every day that drive by, every single day, thousands of vehicles drive by this shop and see this massive 16 by 8 sign that we put up. It's for our shop space, but also serves as a great way to have advertising. So if you're comparing shop spaces and you're getting your business a little bit bigger, I'm willing to spend a little bit more, like 5, 6, $700 more if it's central to my area in terms of my service area, closer to my customers and next to a road or highway that's going to bring me a lot of publicity and therefore a lot of leads. Now let's go check out what the budget version of doing this is. Your business might actually be being ran right now out of a storage facility or even your garage and you don't have a fancy shop space. One way to still get billboards out, get signage up is something like this. This is actually at a mechanic shop just a couple miles away from our shop. Again on the main drag where a lot of people are going to see the sign. It's on the opposite side of the highway compared to our shop which is down the road. This again allows people to be able to see the sign and its position right here next to an intersection. So when people are stopped, they can see directly. It's yellow, it stands out. And really in order to be able to get this, we pay exactly $0 how we mow this little part of land right here. And so if you're looking for billboards or signage and you don't have the shop space and you don't have a lot of money, one way is just give away your services in exchange for putting out signage on someone's property. Commercial properties already usually have signs, but even residential customers, if they're in a really good spot, you might be able to negotiate free services in exchange for putting up a sign in their property.

Angie's List, Thumbtack, Yelp and other lead providing services, they're okay in Some markets, I've seen people build an entire business off the back of these lead genitive services and it's not horrible. But I've also seen people spend 20 and 30% of their total revenue on getting leads from these services. And the thing that I don't like about it is you're basically on this like IV drip from them and if you was to be cut off, your business would collapse. I want to be able to ideally generate enough direct response marketing for my customers to eventually have a great brand and they come to me without me having to spend more money on ads. We'll talk more about that later. However, when it comes to Angelist, Thumbtack and Yelp, if they ever stopped the iv, all of a sudden you've built infrastructure, you have trucks, you have employees, you have office staff, you have all of this overhead expense built around a certain number of leads coming in. And if those leads were to stop because they changed the algorithm, because they ban your account, because they stop giving you leads for whatever reason, you could be in a really, really bad spot. I've seen it sometimes where they change the algorithm and the cost per lead goes from 20 or $30 to $60 or $70. And all of a sudden the business model is unprofitable and you don't want to be at the mercy of some other service. There's also been some murky things around, like Yelp reviews, for example, where some of them are not shown if you don't spend money on ads. I just don't like to associate with a company that's going to do that, whether or not they do or not. You can look up and look up online, but ultimately I don't like their sales tactics. People calling me all the time, trying to convince me to do more and get me on like contracts. A lot of these businesses term agreements to get you leads when reality, the thing about seasonal businesses is there's time of the season where you don't have enough capacity to take on more leads. And then other times of the year you would rather double down and get more leads because you need more work and you don't have enough jobs in the schedule. And so the seasonality of our services, a lot of times I don't like being locked into long term commitments to buying leads from a provider. And ideally I'd like to control the flow of leads and I'd like to be doing the direct response marketing so I build my brand instead of renting these leads from someone else. That's going to also give Those same leads to other of my competitors. I don't want my mowing customer that I got from thumbtack to then when they need a mulch install, they're going on thumbtack again and asking five of my competitors or I got to buy the lead again. I want it to be able to be where people come. I get them initially with lawn mowing or another gateway service, and then I'm able to upsell them all the other services on their property without having to go and compete with all my competition. That's what allows me to be able to do service that might be a little bit lower margin, get people in the door, and then I could upsell them into other higher margin services like mulch or trimming the bushes or fertilization. And I don't want to be at the risk of thumbtack, Yelp, or Angie's List trying to go to my competition and get them to get the customer and sell off my lead that I work so hard for.

All right. Another way you can get more customers is through something called every door direct mail. Now, this is through the United States Postal Service, the most reliable branch of our government. Not really, but this would be a commercial mailbox. But obviously every single residential house has a mailbox. And so when I'm trying to advertise my lawn care business, I want to ask myself, how do I get into every person's mailbox? Yes, I could put a postage stamp on every single person's, you know, postcard or flyer, but that's going to cost me like 50, 60 cents a pop. I don't want to have to pay that. So the USPS United States Postal Service and other services in Australia and Canada, they have similar services where you can do bundles of flyers and postcards and give them to every single door inside of a mail route and end up in every single mailbox. Now, these are the flyers. These are the different versions that we have on lawncaremedia.com you can also do different sizes of postcards, just like this one. This one's for snow shoveling. This is for mowing services. These are all available in lawn caremedia.com now, what's important is, is that on your design, you actually have a stamp that's printed and it says local postal customer. This is really important. Some different post offices, the people that work there are super stickler on exactly what that postage stamp must look like. So before you go out and order 10,000 of these, go take one of them to your local postmaster and be like, yo, does this work. Is this going to be okay? Because I've seen people get declined and it's not good. And so you can check these out on lawn caremedia.com or at least just go look at them. Get some ideas of how you can design your postcard or your flyer, but make sure you have the correct stamp on it. Now, this is going to usually cost you between 16 and 20 cents per location or per address that you're inside of a mail route. What's really, really cool about every door direct mail is you're able to actually see on their software, on their website exactly how many pieces are going to be in every mail route, as well as the average age and income of everyone that lives inside of that mail route. This allows you to really hone in on, like, specific neighborhoods, specific parts of town. Instead of just canvassing the entire city in, say, like a newspaper or a billboard, we can't control as much who's seeing the ad. In this case, you actually get to control which addresses you're targeting, as well as get to know the information of their ages and whether or not they are residential and commercial and how old they are. These are all really important parts of home services because a lot of us want to go after a wealthier demographic that's a little bit older. And so you can see all the information. If you just go usps EDDM on Google, you'll pull up that tool and you can look in your area and see all of this information for free. Now, when it comes to every door direct mail, there's a few different things I like to keep in mind. I don't. I'm not a huge fan of just canvassing with a bunch of random postcards and flyers. I like to have one of three things. One, have a very specific killer offer. That killer offer could be a massive discount, like 80, 90% off. It could be your first service is free, something that just really gets people's attention. That great offer, good deal. A second thing I've seen work really well with every door direct mail is having a personal letter. So instead of having it super fancy, where it's all color like this, actually make it look as if it's a personal letter you're mailing to everybody, and then you can just send it to the entire neighborhood or the entire mail route. The third way that I've seen every door direct mail work really good is if on your flyer or your postcard, you have actual pricing. So they, instead of having to ask for a quote, they're just actually Calling you to confirm the estimate you've given them. Now, that only works if you're going to target a very specific area where you know the generalized price for a certain type of house. For example, in 5, 600 houses, all the same, like for mowing, for example, it's like, okay, they're all about $50 per cut. Just put the pricing on there. And then they call and they confirm the price instead of asking for a price proposal.

Most of the strategies we've talked about so far include what I call renting the customer's attention. In other words, every single time I want more customers, I've gotta send them.

Another postcard, I've gotta put out another door hanger, I've gotta put another Facebook.

Ad or a Google Ad up. And ultimately I'm renting the attention of.

The customer because every if I stop.

Spending money on advertising, I stop getting leads. There's one way to ensure that you have a steady stream of leads and you get more and more of them as time goes on and you build your brand without having to spend money for every single lead. And that's through your website. And that is the number one way, in my opinion, in the long term to get more customers. If we think about direct response marketing.

That'S usually what I associate with things.

Like door hangers, flyers, postcards, even ads that you see on Google. You're asking people to take a direct action, fill out a form, give you a call, fill out an instant price form and collect and accept the estimate. These are what we call direct response marketing. But branding is a much longer term play. And your website I like to think of as more of a branding play. However, when you think about branding, you think about people getting customers without having to actually spend money on ads. Like Apple didn't convince me with a very specialized postcard sent to my house to buy this iPhone. I just went to the store and bought it because of the brand of Apple. And so when you're trying to create a brand, having a great website is the number one way to do this. As a home service business, I think of it like owning a house versus renting a house. Yes, I can keep renting a house.

For 30 or 40 years and just.

Keep paying the landlord. Or I can pay my mortgage. And yes, it costs something. It's not free to have a website or own a house. But now it's kind of putting money in my own pocket because I don't have to constantly be paying rent once I pay off the 30 year term on a mortgage. I own the house and I can still use it. And so I think of the same thing when it comes to my website. I want to own the customer. I don't want to be renting them from Google, renting them from Facebook, renting them from Thumbtack. I want to actually own the customer. And I believe having a great website with your home service business will allow you to charge 5 to $10 more per hour, at least simply by having a website that shows your brand, colors, your uniforms, your trucks so you're insured, separates you from 80 to 90% of your competition. And for everyone's like, there's so many competitors, it's so price competitive in my market. Well, separate yourself from the other 80 and 90% of people that don't have a website, are insured, aren't doing things above board. And if you are, show that on your website, on your website, show your brand, not random pictures off of Google about your home service, but like show your guys, your employees in your trucks doing services at your customer's property. Make sure it's well designed for something like mobile, because a lot of your traffic is going to come from a mobile device. Have your estimate request form above the fold. So when customers come to the website and they're looking to get an estimate, they can immediately identify how to contact you to be able to get a quote. They don't have to go to a contact Us page or scroll way down. Make sure when they first come to.

The site that it actually says what.

Areas of your city or county you service and what services you offer.

Otherwise, the customer is confused as to.

Whether or not you can even help their problem. If you have five or 10 employees and they're all working eight or 10 hours a day and you're able to get five or $10 more per one.

Of their hours, having a great website.

Could literally, just from a price perspective, generate tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue simply because the perceived value of the customer by you having a.

Great website that shows off all of.

Your reviews and shows that you're a reputable company. So even if it didn't produce any new leads, I recommend getting a great website, but also from a lead generation perspective, as your brand grows, as you get more trucks rolling, as word of mouth is generated. Now when people go to your site, they fill out a form, you don't pay any extra money to get that lead, and all of a sudden you're getting leads for pennies compared to having to go buy one every single time you need more customers. When it comes to building your website, I think about the good, better, and best model. There's ways to spend just 50 bucks a month. There's also ways to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your website.

Watch this video here.

I'm gonna walk you through the entire process of starting a lawn care business. And one of them breaks down exactly how this website should be built.