Why Your Ads Don't Work! [Mike Andes]

I'm Mike Gandies and today we're talking about why your ads aren't working. And I had to learn this the hard way. Spent tens of thousands of dollars doing it the wrong way. And I want to share what I've learned over the course of building 150 plus locations at Augusta Lawn Care in terms of building your home service business without wasting a bunch of money on marketing. So let's go and get started. Direct marketing. In my opinion, the way I define direct marketing is it has a CTA or a call to action, alright? Which means it's going to be very clear in terms of what I want the customer to do. I want them to call me, I want them to text me, I want to fill out this form, I want them to click here. I have some sort of call to action. And I believe that if you're getting started in your home service business and you don't have a big business already that you're buying or you know, you don't have a hundred plus thousand dollars to spend on marketing, you're going to want to focus on direct marketing. Now most businesses, when you look at franchises that do food or gyms, they can spend tens of thousands, upwards of $100,000 on just their initial budget for grand opening marketing. And for the vast majority of us in home services, we got started with a whole lot less than that in our total budget, let alone just for your grand opening marketing. And so a lot of times we think that we need a market like them. And that in my opinion might not be the right option for you because when you're doing direct marketing, you actually have an end result. And that is I want the customer to usually request an estimate. That's usually the goal of all of your advertising when you're doing home services. And when it comes to direct response marketing, it's like, do you want them to call you? Do you want them to fill out a form, do you want them to email you? You make it very clear what you want them to do. Now the goal in the long run is that we switch from direct marketing to branding. Now what is branding? In my opinion, it is just a matter of the type of marketing you will do as a brand is very different than when you're doing direct marketing. And I warn against this because a lot of really successful brands that we all know and like Apple, Coca Cola, et cetera, they run ads very, very differently than small businesses. They don't do direct response marketing, they do branding and they're willing to spend hundreds of Millions if not billions of dollars doing brand campaigns. And I think that because we see those ads and we try to emulate those very popular companies, we do ourselves a disservice because direct response marketing is actually going to be the thing that allows us to grow our business. It's very different from to grow a business from zero to a million dollars in annual revenue than it is trying to go from $20 billion to a hundred billion dollars. And I think a lot of times we look at these $20 billion companies that are trying to become hundred billion dollar companies and we try to advertise like they do. And I think that's a mistake. Here's why. Because they are spending money on marketing when it comes to branding, which means they have no call to action. They don't in the, in, in the Apple ad that they show, they don't actually tell you to go and go to this apple.com and fill out this form or call us today or 15 off for the next 20 minutes. Like you don't see that you, if you see an Apple ad it's like people like happy people communicating, using technology. Usually some older people, usually some children, nice landscape. You know, if you watch, you know most car your views and companies like it's very much like they're just showing the experience, the lifestyle. That's why people say they have a lifestyle brand and they don't really show the product in terms of call now, buy now, click here, you know, send this in, go to our website and fill out the form. And because of that I see some small businesses even with a couple thousand dollars of their budget, they spend it all on something that is brand related. We with no clear call to action. And instead of trying to do direct marketing, instead of trying to do this, they try to do what all the big brands are doing and that is spend the money on branding. Here's the problem. If you spend money on branding, it assumes the customer knows the brand. And branding is most effective when people already know what an iPhone is, they already know what a Nike shoe is. And so those brands can leverage their brand to, to be able to do marketing very differently than small businesses. So I recommend personally that you spend your money on things that are asking for the sale. I don't recommend that you do a door hanger that just has all your services and your website and your phone number and everything's on there that's in a form of branding. You're just kind of like throwing your message out there. I would rather you have a very clear Call to action. A very clear CTA inside of your marketing that says, take a picture of this and I'll get you on the schedule and you put your pricing on there, or go to our website and fill up the form and you'll get a quote. Or within 24 hours, if you call this number, we will have an estimate to you. The whole goal is to give them a quote. The vast majority of home services are, our end point for a new lead is when they ask for a quote. And so I believe that if you have a marketing budget under six figures, you should be spending your money on direct response marketing. Now, as you begin to do a lot of advertising and your brand begins to build and you get more trucks and more employees and people have seen your, your, your brand and your, your marketing material, your advertisements and your yard signs and your door hangers and your trucks driving around. What happens is your customer acquisition cost goes down as your brand power and your brand awareness goes up. And that's why we all know Apple. That's why we all know Nike. We don't need to necessarily see the Apple phone at the end of the ad and see how much it costs and where to go. They don't even show that. And we don't need to see it because we can just tell by the branding. Same thing with Nike shoes. They don't need to tell you, like, go to your local Nike store and here's the prices and here's what you're going to do and fill out this form. They don't ask for that. It's a brand. And this is the thing. As you begin to spend money on marketing and you have brand awareness, the customer acquisition costs, in other words, how much you have to spend to get another customer does go down. However, I find a lot of small businesses try to do branding way too soon. And they should focus on having a direct response and asking for a clear call to action. Now how can we hack this? How can we do direct response marketing so that immediately we can get a return on our investment? We don't have to wait eight touches, 10 touches, because that's what it takes for someone to actually remember you. And a lot of times that's a margin. Say you gotta, you gotta touch someone eight times or they gotta see nine times or whatever to be able to make a buying decision. I don't want to do that. I don't want to have to do that for my entire market and spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. I don't, I can't afford to do that. Here's how you can fix that. Okay. We can take our entire market opportunity. Let's just say in your market, there's a 1 million people that are inside of your service area and you could service all of them. This is what I think is the best solution to do when you're getting started, and that is instead of trying to boil the ocean and trying to market to a million people, try to focus on 50,000 or less. Ideally, I would actually like you to focus on just 5000 people. If you're able to take 5000 customers, 5000 addresses in your market, and market to them only, I can guarantee you you'll be able to achieve brand in that local area. Here's what I did when I first started Augusta Lawn Care. I did all of my marketing to this little town that we lived in called Blaine. You can look it up. Blaine, Washington has less than 7,000 people total residents that live there, which means a couple thousand homes, which means I hit every single house in my target area, this little area that I was trying to create my business in. And because I did that, I was able to hit every single door with a door hanger, a yard sign, with postcards in the mail, using every door direct mail. And because I did that, here's what's crazy. Even though I was doing direct response marketing and asking for the sale, and that because I did that, it allowed me to be able to actually get customers and turn that marketing, those that marketing budget and marketing spend into real customers, because that's what I needed needed to do, and they have the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on branding. I need the customers today. But because I kept doing that in one very small market and I didn't try to boil the ocean, I didn't try to go after my entire market and the hundreds of thousands of people that lived around me, even though they were within driving distance. Because I focus on this very small market of just 5,6000 people in my area and just a couple thousand homes, I was able to achieve brand awareness inside of my, my very localized market. And this is what I recommend you do when you're getting started. If you have less than $100,000 and you're getting started and you're spending money on marketing, we're going to do direct response marketing. We're not going to do branding. We're going to have a call to action. But more importantly, I'm going to focus on a very, very small market so I can boil it. I can. Instead of just trying to hit everyone in this, in my market, you know, these million people I'm going to, I'm going to spend, send out 100,000 yards door hangers. Okay, 100,000 postcards, great. I would rather you spent send 10 different postcards to these 5,000 people than send it out to 50,000 people one time. And here's what's crazy. If you do that and you stay in this one centralized area of your market and really penetrate it and you hit them multiple times with door hangers, multiple times, with yard signs, multiple times, with every door direct mail, you're knocking on their door, they're seeing you everywhere. And you know what happens? You actually achieve brand awareness in that local area. You're not going to be able to boil the ocean. You're not going to be able to get everyone inside your entire market to be able to know who you are. You're not going to be able to achieve brand awareness in that area. You just don't have enough money. If you have less than $100,000, you're not going to be able to get a million people in your market to actually know who you are and have brand awareness. And when they think of your service, they think of your business. So my goal, when I go into markets, I want people to think lawn care, Augusta lawn care, yellow trucks with a dog on it, lawn care, professional lawn care, Augusta lawn care. Like that's what I want them to think about. And so instead of trying to do that for my entire market though, I'm going to choose what are the two, three neighborhoods, what's the few thousand houses that I'm going to really target and I'm going to get them to see me everywhere. When they go to the, when they're driving, they're going to see a yard sign. When they go to their door, they're going to see a door hanger. When they open up their door, I'm going to be knocking on it and talking to them. I'm going to send a newsletter and every door direct mail to them inside their mailbox. I'm going to do every, everything I possibly can. I'm going to send, make sure my Facebook ads are targeting just that area. I'm going to make sure my Google Ads are targeting, targeting just that area. I might even use the next door ads just in those neighborhoods. And the reason is because I'm only going after those couple thousand homes, I can achieve brand awareness in that local market. And this is what happened when I, when I started to focus on just those couple thousand homes is I was able to get all my customers in the same area. And what happened is I only had two or three trucks mowing lawns in these neighborhoods. But because all of them were so concentrated, because that's where I was advertising all the time because of that, people in that market started to think, in those neighborhoods, started to think, started to think that I was this massive company. And they're like, man, we see you all over the place. The reason was because I only had two or three trucks, but they were in their neighborhoods every single day. And so every single day they would see my yellow truck that was Augusta Lawn Care. Every single day, they'd see our yellow employee, yellow uniforms on our employees. And what that did is it created brand awareness in this very localized market. And this is what I recommend you do. Start with a small area, use direct response response marketing, and use that direct response marketing to be able to pay for your continually sending out more marketing. Be able to continually grow the business because you actually get revenue right away. We, you don't have time to wait three years for someone to make a decision based on our brand awareness campaigns. And you know, we're doing radio ads and we're doing all these random billboards. Like, the billboard is great, it's fine, but you're not going to be able to make a buying decision quickly and be able to pay for the marketing spend that you spend today. I need to be able to collect that quickly. So I'm going to again, number one, I'm going to focus on direct response marketing, not branding. I'm going to have a call to action. Number two, I'm going to focus on a very small centralized area and do direct response marketing over and over and over again until I start getting customers in the area. And then people start to see me so often that brand awareness starts to be achieved inside of that local market. I start getting referrals and word of mouth and people see me over and over and over again. Not because I have a big business, but simply because I focus on a small area and I focus on boiling it. So instead of trying to just warm up the ocean, boil the puddle, I would rather be boiling the puddle and be the big fish in the small pond, because then guess what's going to happen. You're going to naturally get customers that are going to slowly refer you out to the rest of the market. But I'll do so in a really, really profitable way and I'll be able to make sure that I'm profitable from the very beginning. I don't have to have a lot of money to get started. And if you don't have a lot of money to get started, I see that as the best way when it comes to Augusta lawn care. When we do training, we give them a five mile radius for their territory. But when they come to training, I tell them, start with one mile radius. What are those couple neighborhoods, the 1,000, 2,000 houses that you just want to keep pounding with direct response marketing. And you'll be able to do it for pennies because it's not a huge market. And then you get brand awareness. A bunch of customers in the same area gives you route density. People start to see you all the time and word of mouth starts to flow. And when you start doing that, you start to achieve brand awareness. And when you achieve brand awareness, customer acquisition goes down and you keep getting customers over and over and over again for actually making spending less money. And that's really the goal when it comes to home services. Because the first few years you're paying for every single lead because no one knows who you are. Because you have no brand awareness. Because you have absolutely no awareness of your brand, of your company, of your services and products. You have to spend for every single new lead, every lead that comes to your website, you have to pay to get them there. Because you're not ranking well on Google, you don't have reviews. And because of that, you have to keep spending money on ads. And so people wonder, why does it take three, four or five years to become profitable in home services? Because until then, you're paying for every single new lead that comes in the door versus getting brand awareness. But because everyone wants brand awareness, they do their advertising incorrectly from the get go. When it's like, focus on direct response marketing, get profitable customers, and then keep pounding that area, that very localized area to get brand awareness in a micro area, small part of your market. And then they'll start referring you out, they'll start talking about you. And that's why in year three and four, you start, man, getting all these leads. All of a sudden just customers are calling me all the time because now you have more trucks. They're seeing you, they're seeing the dependability of you're all over the place, you know, especially if you paint your trucks, you put decals, they start to notice you. They notice you because you're at their neighbor's property every single week. And then all of a sudden the leads start to come in because of the brand. And when you achieve that, you're able to get all those same leads without spending any marketing dollars. And that's you really become profitable. And that's why most people in years three to five start to actually make a profit in home services. And is because those first two years, every single lead, you are having to pay for it yourself in the form of direct response marketing. So branding is the goal. But start with direct response marketing, boil that puddle and create brand awareness in that small market. I promise you won't regret it.