3 Local Marketing Strategies To Implement By The End of The Year

In this video, we're going to discuss three strategies to help you finish out 2023 strong and also help you grow in 2024. If you're looking for content to help you increase your sales, keep your schedules full on this channel. That's what we talk about for local service businesses. So let's get right into this video. Alright, so the first thing we're going to talk about is text message marketing. Text message marketing is the new thing that everyone needs to be on. Why? First, when you send out emails, you get a 20, 30% open rate. When you send out a text message, you get a 95% open rate because everyone text messages and everyone sees their text. So what does this look like for local service businesses? If someone fills out a form on your website like this and they submit it, then you should send them an automatic text message that says, thank you, we received your information. Maybe some other automated text messages that will start the conversation, if any. If anything though, it allows for text message communication. That way, if it's 8 o' clock at night and no one is around to answer this request, or if it's on the weekend or whatever, it starts the conversation. So that way you can text people and keep the conversation going once you get back into the office. The other part of text message communication is having some type of a chat widget here. I can't tell you how many times we go to websites when we're doing prospect calls and they don't have a chat widget. What are you doing? You need to have a chat widget. This one turns it into a text message. There's a bunch of tools out there like Podium Chirp Convertible, there's other ones out there, but basically what you want to do is have some type of a chat widget like this that turns it into text message. The reason this is important is because let's say someone comes to our website and they say, okay, you know, what do you do? Who do you work with? Do you work with this type of business? How much does something cost? Those types of questions. They may not be ready fully to discuss their business and get a marketing analysis by us. But what they do want to do is just ask a quick question which this is the perfect way to do it. Turn it to a text to people respond to text. It's a beautiful thing. So that's the first thing is if you don't have text message marketing and you have questions, just drop a comment below if you want to learn more about that. You can discuss your business here. But more importantly, figure out how to get that set up for your business because it's crucial. One other thing about text message marketing that is imperative for local service businesses is that once you get the information in here, you can set up automations so that way you can text customers to confirm their appointment. Just like if you were to set up an appointment with us, it would confirm your tech, you would go through an automated sequence to confirm your appointment. The worst thing that can happen with local service businesses is that you have a full schedule and then people start to cancel or you show up and they're not ready for you. And so if you can text confirm appointments, the beautiful thing is that then you have appointments on your schedule to complete. Highly recommend setting up text marketing. Some CRMs even have it implemented in their CRM system. All right, next one is lead follow ups. So if you have leads from the past year or past two years to finish out 2023, you got to go back through all your leads that you either didn't get into contact with or that were a no and just touch base with them. If you're slow, reach out to them and say, hey, we have a voucher for quarter four for 10% off of our services. I'm not sure if right now's the right time or if you got the service done, but we're looking to fill our schedule and we would like love to talk to you again to see if we might be able to help you with your, your service. That's a great way to finish out that you're really, really strong, is by going through your previous leads. The second thing is to set up an automatic lead follow up which plays into the text message marketing thing, which basically is that any person that's a lead in your business, whether it's a call that comes in a form that's filled out on your website, an email that's sent in, or someone walks into your store, for example, you want to get their name, phone number and email and you want to add them to some type of an automation sequence to follow up with them. The way that this works for local service business is you call, you say, hey, how much does it cost to get my carpets cleaned? They give you the price. Your company gives them the price. They say, okay, let me talk with my wife and I'll get back to you. The common objection that everyone gets and you can't get over it because they got to talk to their wife. So what do you say? You say, okay, that sounds great, why don't I send You a formal email that has everything broken down so that way you can go through it line by line with your wife. Does that sound good? Probably perfect. You get their email and then the last thing you say is, if I don't hear back from you, is it okay if I just follow up with you in a couple days? They're going to say yes. If they say no, then okay, you just add them into an email newsletter of some sort and they get an email automation every single month. But if not, now you have an actionable next step they're not in control of. I got to talk to my wife. And then it just goes nowhere. Now you can follow up with them in a couple days or your CSR can and say, hey, I know you said you're going to talk with your wife. Did she have any questions? Is there anything that I can answer? We really want to work with you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that is really what lead follow up comes to, is that if you don't have a lead follow up process in 2023, get that set up. Because if you generate more leads for your business, which the whole goal of a company is to generate leads, if you're not able to follow up with them in some type of automated fashion or have a set process, you're going to lose out on jobs, revenue, and growing your business. All right, and then the last one that we have here is Google Local service ads. If you're not running Google local service ads, you're missing out. Why? Because it's Google, right? The number one search engine giving you leads that you pay for. It's a pay per lead model. And the reason that this is so good is because even if you get zero leads, why not just set it up? And if you get a lead or two, it's a paid lead from Google. So how does this look? There's ads like google.com local service ads you can put in your zip code. So let's just put in our zip code. Let's say you want one lead, then you select your industry over here. So in your area, let's say that you are a handyman. Then you estimate your budget. And this is saying that for one lead in this zip code is 34 to $51. So what happens is you only pay 34 to $51 if someone turns into a lead. And the beauty of this is that you only pay per lead. So you're not just throwing money at Google. Google's only spending your money if it's giving you a lead. And so what we recommend is just set these up and work on your organic SEO, Get Google reviews, build out your Google business profile, start building trust with Google and eventually they're going to start recommending you if you're doing all the right stuff that Google wants. Because Google only makes money off these when someone clicks the call. So you have to build a strong brand and foundation that that Google wants to recommend. More importantly, that people actually want to click on. So that means that you got to get Google reviews because people want to click on people that have actually, you know, hundreds of Google reviews. And so we made videos about that before. But if you don't have these set up, you're just missing out on opportunities to get leads. Even if you set it up and you get zero leads, as you're continuing to get Google reviews, which talk about on this channel, and as you build out your Google business profile, you're going to start getting leads from Google and, and then you can scale up and use their backend to monitor your leads and get Google leads straight from their website. All right, so those are the three things that we would recommend implementing going into finishing out 2023. Going into 2024, if you have questions about those or you would like a marketing audit, we do free marketing analysis. We have a team of people. What we do is once someone sets up a meeting with us on here, we go in, we analyze their business, we build out a blueprint of what we would do if we were to work with them. We meet with them for 30 minutes, we structure everything and then we either give it to them or they work with us and implement it. So it's a win win for everyone. More importantly, it's just, why not? You're going into 2024. Why not take a shot with a marketing company and have them do an analysis of your business and give it to you. I'll put a link down below if you're interested in that and if not, we'll see you in the next video. Have a great day. I'.