Why Your Ads Don't Work!

If you've been wondering why your Facebook ads, your Google Ads, your door hangers or your yard signs are not working, I want to explain what I learned the hard way and how you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time just doing it the right way from the get. And one of the things that I have learned is that it was not never a matter of whether or not something worked. It was simply the volume and the amount of energy that I put towards it. And so recently I was looking at our Facebook ads account and that had over 130 different types of ads. Not different types of variations, but different types of ads. Now, each of those ads have probably five different headlines, five different copy. So you could make the case for the fact that if you multiply by 25, there's like 3,000 variations of ads. I'm not talking about that. There was 130, over 130 different actual ad creatives, different videos with different descriptions, completely different ads. And this is not something I've done forever. This is a matter of over the past few months just realizing that if it works decently and the math pencils in, just do more of what's already working. And I, along with many other entrepreneurs, including yourself, likely we get distracted by the constant new thing. And recently as of recording this actually equip expo is on for the lawn care and landscape industry. Basically showing a lot of the new technology, new equipment, new trucks, new machines that are mowers, et cetera, that are in this industry. And it's very easy to go to an event like that and just get enamored with all the new stuff. And what I have found after so many years of having to beat myself up and tell myself to shut up in terms of all the new ideas and new things I want to implement, is that almost never has new ideas made my business more profitable. Almost never has new ideas in the short term allowed for the business to be more successful in the short term, for allow my managers to be able to be more successful, the team to be able to be better at their job and more efficient. The reason for that is because as entrepreneurs we have been rewarded in the past for doing something new. We left our job, we left our, like I left medical school. But once you've made the decision to start a business, you just need that new thing one time. You just need to switch and it's exciting and you get a lot of pats in the back on LinkedIn and Instagram and on Facebook when like I'm gonna go start My own business. And you're like, support, everyone's like super happy for you. But that's the only time you actually need to start something new. The vast majority of the most profitable home service businesses that I see are the ones that simply execute better. They don't try to do anything fancy. They just execute 1 to 2% better on every little thing in the business. And if you take 100 different things in the business all done 2 to 3% better than everyone else, it compounds the fact that I get 2 to 3x multiple or 2 to 3 times more return than the average person that's just getting started. And the reason there is so much switching cost in home services to doing something new is because we are dealing with labor, which is the most expensive thing for you to divert a time and attention of your team away from some something they're already doing. They're in the rhythm of they know how to do it. And you change the process, you change the system. Now we're going to do this new service. Now I want you guys to answer the phone this way. Now this is a new initiative. New software, new equipment, or new truck set up, new trailer set up. Like every time you implement something new, it is reducing the effectiveness and the efficiency of your team because there's already inherent advantages of them doing the same thing so many times. And so execution has consistently in my career been the thing that I have seen be the thing that actually brings profits. New things might add more revenue. New services, new equipment, new employees, new markets, new industries, they will bring more revenue, but rarely do I see it actually bring more profit. One of the biggest reasons why your ads are not working is because you're editing your website on a computer like this. And the problem is 80% of your leads are coming from devices that look like this. This is why@homeserverdesign.com if you look at all of the sites on the page that we've built and we show we optimize for a mobile device, I want to make sure that my estimate request forms at the top that my trucks, my uniforms, my brand is clearly identified as a premium service. If you want a free consultation with my team so your website can look better on your phone and convert more leads into your business, go to homeservicewebdesign.com call today. This goes back to a saying Alex Formosi always talked about, which is more and better before new. And I want to break that down. The reason that your ad campaign is not working is simply because you're not doing Enough of it. And when I say you, I'm talking to myself. Because over the past few months, I've realized that for Facebook ads is like, if the math pencils and I'm able to acquire a customer and get that money back within 30 days of them transacting with me, I should keep doing more of it. And the reason I say this is because I have seen consistently where business owners have something that's working well on their ad campaign. For example, I'll give an example of one of the owners at Augusta Lawn Care out in Texas that he realized that this is like, oh, the math works for door hangers. And he did several thousand, like, they worked, oh, okay. I should just do this one thing tens of thousands of times. And I think last time he messaged me he had done something like 120,000 door hangers. This year he started a new market, new area, and all he's been doing is door hangers because he just knows the math. He's like, if I do X amount of doors, I'll get X amount of leads, and if I get X amount of leads, I'll close X amount of people. And out of those people, I will be able to upsell X amount of them. It's just a math game. And I would ask yourself, if yard signs worked, what would happen if you 10x them? It's a light. It's likely that you have 10x the output. And so if door knocking is working, if door hangers are working, if Facebook ads are working and they're producing, okay, Well, I get a one nuke lead for $30 and one out of three of them convert to a paying customer. Okay, great. Your customer cost is $90. Okay. And all of those people, I'm able to sell a recurring service, but also I'm able to upsell them into a one time service up front. Then I'm able to make $500 in revenue and $200 in profit. So I get $200 in profit and $90 customer acquisition cost. The math pencils, just do more of it. Just do more and do it better before going and trying to find something new. And so instead of us 10xing our marketing budget in one area, what we will do, and I include myself in this as entrepreneurs, is we'll go find nine other ways to spend the marketing dollars. Oh, like what about if I do this new texting thing? What if I go out and do mail? Every door, direct mail and postcards. What if I do this new strategy where I have billboards? What If I do like, I change the graphics on the truck and there's a board above the trailer. Like all of those might be good ideas, but because you've spread yourself out so thin across different marketing channels, you never actually see the real reward, which is if I 10x the input and I know what this channel produces, the output will 10x. And there's some areas like for example Google local services, you won't 10x your budget and get 10x the output. Why? Because it's constrained by the amount of leads that it will give to you. It's not going to just immediately 10x and use all of your budget. But in markets that you are interrupting people like Facebook ads, like door hangers, like yard signs, like cold calling. A lot of places you do 10x input and you just simply run an arbitrage on the math and you get 10x the output. And so if the math pencils just do more and you do it better. So more part is simply identifying that I have a channel that I know the math and is it perfect? Is there going to be a new channel that will pop up and immediately I see ads about running Google Ads and how much I can get leads for $5. And then I get all these ideas. When I read a book or I read a podcast or I go to conference, you get all these ideas. Look, just take the one thing that you actually know the math on and just do more of it. And then by doing more of it, you, you almost always will become better at it. You will see what works, you'll see what hooks work, you'll see what pictures work on the ad, you'll see what videos work on ads. You'll realize that if you're doing a yard sign that having a fancy picture might not actually convert better besides just plain text on a white background. Or that when you do the door hanger, if you put the price and you cross it out, you get a 5% bump on the amount of people that respond. This is something that, because we do so many door hangers at Augusta and like we consider a sample of door hangers in a market, 5,000. Like anything below that is, you know, you're just shooting like in the dark. But 5,000, I can have a test. But when I do that test and when we have done thousands, hundreds of thousands of door hangers now across Augusta, we started to start doing better. It's like, oh, if we put the price of the their lawn service on there, it does better. Oh, if we use an actual Sharpie instead of Just printing the price on there, it does better because they feel like it's more customized. Oh, if we cross the number out and then write it in Sharpie over top of the old price at a discount increases our conversion rate that is better because of new. So the nuance I want to add to this is, yes, more and better before new, but I truly believe it is in that sequence. Do more. And by doing more and simply keeping your eyes open and your ears open over the course of a long period of time, not a month, not two months, over the course of a couple seasons, to be able to know the seasonality behind that marketing channel, and then by seeing those trends and then being adaptive and listening, you will do better. You will make the tiny little tweaks. Because, see, when I first did a door hanger, I might have gotten a 0.2% response rate. Not great. Door hangers are horrible. Or over the course of the past three or four years, like, we have constantly made these little tweaks. Now it's 1%. That's five times better. So it's not that I needed a new marketing strategy. I just needed to get better. And in order to get better, I needed to do more and have higher volume. And so I encourage you. If you think that ads don't work, if you think that the only way that you get customers is through word of mouth, if you think that Facebook ads are dead or. Or YouTube ads are dead, or Google Ads are dead, or door hangers don't work in my market, or postcards don't work in my market, our flyers don't work in my market. I ask you, how many have you done? Can you do more? And when you do more, can you constantly tweak and adjust and make it better? Because I can guarantee you in the long run, that will outperform you. Constantly switching from one marketing channel to the next and hearing a video about some other new channel, new platform. Oh, it's gotta be. It's all about doing these postcard bombs. Okay, no. 9 around. Okay, now we're doing. Oh, I heard about yard signs. We are now doing yard signs. And again, you take all of your resources and spread them across all these different channels and then wonder why you don't have any return. The reason you have any return is you've never done more at any one channel. You've never done enough volume to be able to get good at it better. And therefore, you just constantly go from new to new to new, always looking for the lucky break that's going to somehow give you all the results that the people behind the camera you've watched or the ads you've seen are promising. And here's the thing, they might be right. They might get really cheap leads. They might be able to reach those results in terms of customer acquisition cost, cost per click, cost per lead, et cetera. They might. But they've likely done it tens of thousands of times and for many, many years. And so the results they're having is not because of the new channel. It's because they've done more of it than you. And because of them doing it more for years and years and years, they've got better at it. And you take the same channel and you put someone who hasn't had the reps and has not got better at it. And something like our door hangers that go from 0.2% response to 1% response is simply a function of doing enough volume and then being. And listening enough and being curious enough to how can I improve this process and thereby have better execution? And all of a sudden a bad channel starts to look good.