Phil Risher (Flash Consulting) presents three marketing tactics for local service businesses to add in 2023: 1) text message marketing (argues texts have far higher open rates than email and gives example uses and wording); 2) tracking marketing ROI with a simple spreadsheet to compare channel costs vs. revenue and reallocate budget; and 3) using Google Local Service Ads (pay-per-lead, top-of-search placement, and budgeting by desired leads). The video includes concrete numeric examples (open-rate comparisons, sample spend vs. revenue, and example lead cost ranges).
Questions this video answers
October 4, 2022.
About 20% open rate.
About 98% open rate.
Example: $15,000 spent on Google generating $150,000 in revenue (speaker's illustrative case).
About a 10× return (15,000 → 150,000).
Chapters
Alright, in this video we're going to discuss the three marketing tactics that you need to implement in your business for 2023. And the first one that we're going to discuss is text message marketing. And what text message marketing is is this is our customer journey that we use here at Flash. And what this tells us is that new customers come into the business, they go through this process to get to a sale, then they come out the other side and they go through retargeting, which is like social media newsletters, text marketing, and then come back into the funnel. This, this text message marketing is something that every single company should be doing. And over the next three to five years, every company's going to be expected to do this. The text message is the new email, the email is the new postcard, and the postcard is a new telegram. Things are changing and the way that we communicate are changing. When you look at email marketing, for example, through like a monthly newsletter, the open rates on that is about 20% of people open it. So if you have a thousand people and you send it to those thousand people and 20% open them, that's 200 people. If you have a text message and you send the text message to a thousand people, it has a 98% open rate. So 980 people are going to see that text message. And so it gets you in front of your customers a lot sooner. Some ideas for text messages that you can send in 2023 are appointment reminders. So like H Vac texts, if you have fall and spring inspections, that's a great way one off specials. So hey, here's $20 off this. It's really good if you put your name in there. So for example, like hey, this is Phil from Flash Consulting, we are offering $20 off for spring cleaning. Please hit reply if you're interested in taking advantage of that or something like that. Another way you can use text message marketing is appointment reminders for jobs that are approaching just to check in Happy holidays. I mean there's a million different ways you can use it, but that is a really good way and a tactic that you should use in 2023. All right, the second one that we're going to discuss is actually tracking your marketing roi, your return on investment. And you can do this very simply using an Excel spreadsheet. And what this allows you to do is you can make these columns so your marketing channels, put all the channels that you market on, then your annual cost of what you're currently spending on all these ones and then revenue year to date. So let's say in this example we spent $15,000 on Google and, and we generated $150,000 on Google. We can see that our profit on that based on a 25% profit margin is $375,000. And the other thing about using a marketing tracker like this is that you can get the percentage of what your total budget is. So when you put in all these costs, you can see that, okay, well I'm spending 17% on Google and I'm spending 23% on Angie's list. But you, Angie's list is only generating me $60,000. So that is only 21,000 to 60,000 is only three times what I'm spending where Google 15,150. Oh, that's 1.5 to 150,000 is a 10 times return, a 10x return. And so what this allows you to do is to see maybe we need to decrease this and increase this. So I'll put a link down to this below. If that's something that you're interested in, you can go and use this tool and this will be instrumental in budgeting for 2023. Because a lot of times people just shotgun approach, like let's just see what happens. And they don't really track where things are coming from. And so you can get your annual cost from your P and L. If you use like QuickBooks or something, just go there and look at your expenses and you can get your total revenue either on your web forms that come in from your website, they should track your lead source. But more importantly, anytime someone books a job in your company, if you use a CRM like Service Titan, Service Monster, you know, Housecall Pro Jobber, they should select the lead source of where that lead came from. They should ask them, hey, how did you hear about us? And then they should put these channels in here. And as you can see, like text message marketing, there should be some type of ROI generated, email marketing, there should be some type of generated. So it's as granular as you want to get. But this is just a good way to have a marketing budget going into 2023. All right, and then the last thing that we're going to discuss is called Google Local Service Ads. And what these are is when someone searches for a product or service in a specific area and Google knows your area, regardless if you put your geo target or not, they're going to pull up these things right here. These Google guaranteed, they're called Google Local Service Ads. And the reason that they're so good is because first they have the number one position on Google. They're higher than these search results. They're higher than this right here. This, it's the number one spot on Google. So this is really what you want. More importantly, the second thing is that you only pay per lead. So you only pay when someone clicks this button to call you or if they click here and they go and fill out a form. And so how much does this actually cost? So if you go to ads.google.com LocalServiceAds Again, I'll put this link down below. You can go right here and just put in your zip code and you can put in how many leads that you want per month. Let's say you want 10 leads and then you just select your industry. Let's say it's carpet cleaning. Then we know that it's going to be, let's say we just want 1:23 to $35 a lead. So at this point, you can set your budget on your marketing budget and say, okay, I'm going to spend whatever a thousand dollars on the, on these leads. So let's say I want 100 of these. I'm going to spend 2.2, $300. So let's say I want 50 leads every single month. You just set your budget and then you're going to get 50 leads. Now, there are some caveats on this because again, Google only shows three companies here, but if you see there's 50 plus carpet cleaners nearby. So just because you set your budget at a certain amount doesn't mean that Google is going to automatically say, okay, here's 50 leads. Now, because there are other factors that go into this, which are your reviews, your rankings, as well as other things that you can do on your Google local service ads to make them more prominent. One really good one is like your track record on Google. How long have you been on Google for? And they're going to pull in because when you're taking the number one spot on Google, they want to make sure that the recommendation that they're making to that company, to the customer is going to be the best one. Because people already trust Google to provide the perfect results. So Those are the three things that I see coming in 2023 that we're going to be rolling out with our clients. If this is something that you're interested in doing and you need help, that's, that's what we do. Again, I'll put a link down below. If not, it's all good. Be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.
