The TOP 1% of Service Businesses Use This Marketing Playbook!

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. That's what really comes into play down here. If you've got a lot of clicks, if you have a great web design 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 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. 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 to 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, you're going to want to do several things. First off, make sure you have a bunch of pictures. For example, let's go ahead 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, 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 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 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 because 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 100 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, hey, if you're in this Facebook group, I'll be 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, people to see that, and two or three of them need the same service. And now 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 are. They need cleaned out. There's an ability to be able to just take an 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, interrupt 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 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 l. 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 different 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 can 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, et cetera. 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 no 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, 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 can 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, 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. 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 that right on there and move right on to 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 you is 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 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 you have to put out in order to get one new lead. Once you 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 core aeration anytime 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 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. 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've 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. And 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 ho neighborhoods 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 out 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 of 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 per click, 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, because 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 people.