AI Agents Local Search | Humans vs. Agents | Ai Overviews | Q&A

customer homeowner questions for people that own home service businesses that have questions when it comes to marketing. And I am excited to answer some of these questions. Um, I'm live. Let me just open up my chat real quick. I got Instagram over here and I got YouTube over here. I got my live chat pulled up and let me just drop this down. All right, uh, cool. Well, while we're here, anyone that hops on, feel free to drop a question into the comments, and we're going to be answering real live questions. My team put together a couple that people had submitted. So if you're watching this after the fact, drop your questions in here because we go live pretty much every week answering questions. Cool, got the chat opened. Just pop this up real quick. All right, cool, we're good. All right, first question we got here: I've burned through 3 marketing agencies in 2 years. $10,000 a month each, and the best one got me one real client. How do I stop wasting money and find someone who actually knows my industry? Okay, this is a really big issue that I see. A lot of times people spend money with marketing agencies that don't actually know about their business. Like, for example, if you own a home service business and you work with a marketing agency that does global SEO or global ads, it's much harder for them to know the exact situation. So I'll give you a perfect example. We had a client that is a remodeling company and they were working with a marketing company that was in Canada. And that company that was in Canada was not running Google Local Service Ads for them because in Canada they didn't have Google Local Service Ads. They had the number 1 ranking from a reviews perspective, but they didn't know about Google Local Service Ads. So when they came to work with us in the US, when we say, hey, you got to run Google Local Service Ads, and within the first month They got over $150,000 in estimates from Google Local Service Ads. And so this is what I'm talking about in this question, which is you need to make sure that you work with a company that knows your industry. They know the CRMs that you use. They know the best platforms that work for certain industries, because if you work with companies that don't know your industry, then you're basically paying for them to learn about your industry and be a guinea pig. And you don't even know if it's going to work. So you need to have a track record. The other thing that I'll say about vetting out agencies, because I used to be at a home service business that was $3 million, help them get to $5 million and then sell. And the biggest thing that I faced was working with agencies and not knowing if they were going to be good or not. Obviously, a salesperson can get on the call and tell you what you want to hear, but how do you know if they're actually going to be good? So the first thing is go read their actual reviews. If they do not have Google reviews, then— and they do, you know, home service marketing of some sort, then do they really believe that this is actually going to help them? So one of the biggest things is go read the reviews. The second thing would be look at businesses that they work with. So, you know, ask them like, well, what's a business or two that you work with? Like, let me just check out what they're doing. Like check out their website, check out their Google Business Profile, check out the content that they're creating, and then just get a vibe for what they're doing. And then the last one, this is the biggest thing that I'll say is if you have a company that is not doing all of the stuff that they tell you to do, for example, like email content, blog content, social content, SEO, that kind of stuff. If they're not doing that stuff for themselves and they tell you that you should be doing it, it's like the plumber that has a leaky toilet or a painter that has a house that needs painted. They got to be doing the stuff that they tell you to do. While I'm here, I'm live, so ask questions. We just got one that popped up. Let's see. Local search is programmatic SEO with JavaScript and Python script to generate— JS. Okay, let me show this on the stream. Um, cool. Local search, programmatic SEO with JavaScript and Python script to generate JS. Uh, what I'll say is that local search is shifting a ton. Um, I actually have a video coming out next week and the video is about how local search is changing specifically on ChatGPT, and it's actually different than what's happening on AI, uh, mode in Gemini and Google. For example, ChatGPT just partnered with Yelp and Yelp is licensing their reviews, uh, all the information from the Yelp platform into ChatGPT and even they're gonna have a request of quote. So I would say local search right now is built on SEO principles. Yep. Because Google tells us that. Um, the biggest shift though is that these two players, ChatGPT over a billion users, Gemini, Google over a billion users, they're having two separate wars of how they're going to be showing local results. So it's going to be two separate strategies. So there's some big shifts coming there. Um, while I'm live, I got some people here, um, on Instagram and YouTube. Feel free to drop some questions. Uh, I'm live. I have a couple other, uh, questions that we have planned for this as well. Uh, let me just pop up the second question here. Um, all right, let's see. We're not converting any leads in one of our markets. Zero closed deals from $1,500 in ad spend. When is it smarter to pause and save the cash versus keeping— keep investing to build a presence? So essentially, this person is spending $1,500 a month and they're not seeing any customers coming in from it. And this is a really big issue. I face this as well at my home service business. So if you're spending money on ads and you get $0 in your CRM, there's usually 2 or 3 reasons why. And the first one is you need to get the full picture. So the full picture is how many leads did you get? Because you might have spent $1,500 and you got 10 leads, but maybe zero of them turned into anything. So that's the first step is figure out the number of leads. So if this example, let's say you got $1,500, let's say you got 10 leads, that's $150 a lead. Then you have to go and say, okay, those 10 leads that I got, what happened to them? Were they good quality? Did they answer the phone? Did they book an estimate? Because what we found a lot of times is that they end up going through the process and they do get an estimate, but they never close for whatever reason. And usually that reason is because colder audiences, like when you run ads, colder audiences don't trust you as much. So it's a lot harder to build that trust with them. So you have to have a pretty tight sales process in order to convert. So to answer your question directly, if you're spending $1,500 and you have zero money to show for it or no customers, the first thing I would do is analyze the full funnel. How many leads did you got? Did those leads actually turn into anything? And then when I mean turn into anything is like, did you actually generate an estimate from it? And then after that estimate, did you actually close something? And then if that all checks out and it's like the leads were not good, the estimates were not good, then it's like a lead quality issue. And then can you fix that? But I wouldn't just cut it because you said $2,000 and then you didn't make any money when you need to look at the full funnel because usually you can get any of these platforms to work. Yelp, Google, LSA, Meta, even as long as you have the right system and game plan. All right, cool. Let me go to the next question. I'm live. Hey, Instagram, see you over there. Feel free to drop the comments in Instagram right here. And then same thing with YouTube. Let's go to the next one here. All right. This one's a really good one. Again, if you have questions, drop them in the comments here. How does hiring an agency compare to dollars and cents to just hiring someone in-house to run this? This is a really, really great question because it comes up a lot, especially like we work with $1 million to $10 million home service businesses and it's like, when does it make sense to bring on an agency? And then when does it make sense to do it in-house? So I'll give you an example. We had a guy, a $7 million, $7-ish million HVAC contractor in Ohio, met with him. He told us that last year he fired his agency and he went all in-house. So he hired a developer, he hired an SEO person, he hired a content creator, and he hired someone to run his ads. So we have 4 people. His payroll went to $300,000, $400,000 for his marketing department. Now, that marketing department is working 24/7 for him on his stuff, doing things. That's going to be more expensive than if you were to hire an agency, but the output might be way better because they're on, you know, in your business doing it 24/7. However, what he found was what a lot of people run into when they decide to make that shift. What he found was that one, it's hard to find people that are excellent at all of these things. Two, the things in marketing change so fast that when you hire someone, you also have to make sure that you're training them and keeping them up to speed with all the new stuff that comes through. You can't just hire people and then say, hey, you know, this is what it is. And what he found was that if you work with an agency and then layer in some type of like a marketing coordinator or someone, The agency can be the experts. The agency can provide the oversight on exactly what to do, right? The agency can have an ads person. The agency can have an SEO person. The agency can have developers. And then the internal person can be working more boots on the ground and strategizing with the agency without having to carry the overhead, without having to make sure that they're staying up to date with things. And it gives it a better balance. So after a year of doing that, he was like, hey, I'm going back to this. I'm going to have the coordinator in here. So that's the first thing. What I will say is once you get to around like $9, $10 million, $15 million, you can get away with having someone who's just a content creator in your business. You can get away with hiring some type of like SEO expert or something inside of your business or like an ads person inside of your business. I would just hesitate to do that because it's a, it's, I mean, you know, if you own a business, it's a lot easier to make a change if you just have like an agency or some type of person that's doing some type of work that you're like, okay, this is not working out. Onto the next one. You know, when you have an employee, it's a lot more relationship. You got to do one-to-ones, you got to do all the stuff. So, uh, yeah, I think that's how I would go back and forth with this. Um, I'm live answering questions, YouTube, so drop a comment, uh, if you have a question that you would like answered. I'm just going through some of the questions from our previous lives that our team pulled. All right, uh, referrals. So question— this question here: referrals work better than anything else right now? How do I actually systematize asking for them instead of hoping customers remember? So a lot of businesses, especially as you get $1 to $3 million, like right around there and below that, referrals work better than anything else. And how do I actually systematize asking them instead of hoping customers remember? So here's what I would recommend. When we talk about referrals, every single person I talk to says referrals are the best leads. Why? Because they're warm, they close, uh, much higher clip. And they're easier, right? They come in, they already know a little bit about you. Someone told them to work with you, so they're going to close. However, whenever I talk with them, there's no system for referrals. So when we talk about having a system for referrals, here's what I would recommend. One is after every single person comes through your funnel, make sure that you have some type of like referral code or referral form or something that you can recommend to them. There's a really cool tool that's called Cliki, C-L-I-K-I. I don't have any affiliation with them. I've had Kendall on the podcast several times. What Clicky allows you to do is every single person that comes to your funnel, you can give them a custom code so that way that code, when they use it, they get paid out for any referrals that they send you. It basically helps you systematize your referral process and give an opportunity to pay out for referrals. So that would be one of the things that I would recommend is coming up with a system like that. If you don't want to go the whole automation route, at my home service business, we were $3 million and about $1.5 million of that was referrals. What we did was we partnered with local businesses and we turned their technicians into our sales team and we paid them anytime that they referred us a client. And the basic tech stack that we have for that was we set up a page on our website that was, let's just say, flashconsulting.com/referrals. On that page was a custom form. So that custom form allowed people to then put in the information that they would want to refer. And when they sent us a referral, if it ended up closing, we would send them a gift card. So we basically gave them like $20, you know, $50 per customer that closed, and then they accrued points, and then they got money from there. I would recommend if you don't have a system, just start with that, and then you can, you know, automate it from there. But I would say the best thing you can do is come up with a process for referrals, especially because they're the best leads that you could get. Um, cool. Uh, Instagram, I'm here live. Uh, YouTube, I'm here live. Got questions, drop them in the chat. All right. Here we go. Everyone's telling me to use AI to write blog posts, but isn't that just AI slop that Google's going to penalize? What actually works? Okay, great question here. Everyone right now is saying, oh, you can, you know, have this Claude agent that's going to write your content for you and do SEO and all that stuff. And you can have it do that. If you want actual good content, there's two types of stacks here. So the first one is what you're referring to. A marketing company or a person goes to Claude or ChatGPT and asks it to come up with some type of content. So like, hey, I want to write a blog post about X, Y, and Z. I wanna do a social post about X, Y, and Z. Then they go through and say, okay, let me give it my 2 cents on what I think it actually needs to be refined to. And then they go through and say, okay, let me think about how I would say this if I was a customer. They kind of go through that hierarchy. The problem is, to your point and to what Google tells us, is that that's commodity content. That's starting with AI slop and then trying to, uh, put lipstick on a pig, right? Refine it to your liking based off of what they gave you. What we recommend and what we do, this is why we built a tool called Turner, is because we actually flip that on the other side where we start with the customer question from the call transcripts. Then we layer in the knowledge base that's built on the business, that knows about the business. Then we fill in the blanks or the dots with AI. This starts from a truly unique content piece and builds up into AI, opposed to starting with AI slop and trying to build down lipstick on a pig style. So what actually works is start with your customer conversations, layer in a knowledge base about your business, then move up to refine it with some type of AI platform. And Google tells us in their help docs that they want non-commodity content, and they literally say that commodity content is listicle style content. 7 reasons to do X, Y, and Z in the summer. That's commodity content that Google doesn't want. They want unique content, which you would get from your customer questions and calls. All right, next question we got. Thanks guys, I appreciate you sending in some of these questions. Should I be pulling the questions people ask on Reddit and forums and answering them in my content? Does this actually work now? Okay, kind of like what I was saying before, this is a good strategy to answer questions that are in Reddit forums or other places. I would recommend starting with your real customer questions. Why? Because let's say that you're in Miami and you do tree care. Well, the questions that happen in Miami for tree care are gonna be a lot different than what people ask in New York. And the location and specificity of what you can talk about with real customer questions is much different than taking a broad topic that you might see on Reddit with conversations. And I'll take this even a step further, which is if you can create content about local communities or local areas, and the services that you can provide in those areas, it's even better because it's non-commodity content. There's no way that AI or AI slop or anyone else would have that experience or know that knowledge. That would be something that you would be able to provide. So that would be, yes, you can do Reddit and forums and questions from there. I think it's okay, but the better place to start is with your real customer questions from your call recordings and using a tool. Like I mentioned, Turner is a really good tool for that, that we, that we use to integrate with your call recordings. Um, all right, cool. Let's see, how do I know if my lead numbers are even accurate? Okay, uh, I have actually— I have a book coming out called The Second Engine, and the number one thing is data integrity. Uh, when we build, there's three parts to the engine, and the number one thing is data and data integrity. And a lot of times when we talk to businesses, and me included, at my business, in my home service business, it was very hard to know if my lead numbers was accurate. And the reason is because Let's say calls come in. Do calls go into your CRM? Probably not, because the only thing that would go into your CRM, maybe if you have forms coming into your CRM or requests coming into your CRM, those would be leads. But a lot of times calls don't ever make it into your CRM. And even if we take it a step further, let's say you use a platform like Yelp or Angie or Thumbtack, those conversations that happen on those platforms, do they ever make it into your CRM? And so when you think about how do I pull a true accurate lead number, If you don't have everything going into your CRM and you haven't coached your CSR or your team to put everything in the CRM, you're probably not gonna have an accurate lead number. And the reason that this is so important is 'cause if you're paying for marketing, then the first thing is you wanna see your leads going up year over year. You wanna know, okay, I got 100 leads and then I need 120 leads if I wanna grow 20%. And if you don't have all of the data, then you can't make good decisions and you're kind of just guessing based off of the information. So my recommendation would be, if you don't know your leads number and if it's even accurate, then I would go back to the process, which is our process is every single lead that comes into the business, calls, texts, Yelp messages, forms, everything needs to go into the CRM so we have a source of truth for all leads. And that's how I would know that that's actually happening and have accurate lead numbers so you can look at year-over-year data. All right, cool. Let's see, next up. My business is seasonal. Does it make sense to only run marketing for 6 months a year? Good question. What I will tell you about this in particular, we have some clients that do lawn care, for example, and in January, February, like in New York, for example, they might do some snow stuff, you know, snow removal, snow plowing, but like it's not their bread and butter, but but they're not doing lawn care, that's for sure. So do they do holiday lights? Do they fill in the gaps with gutter cleaning or other things? And there's a case to be made for all of those things so that way you don't just have a business that only runs 6 months. Some people say, I don't want to do all of those things. I prefer to have only a 6-month business. And then the other 6 months, I prefer to, you know, do something else or whatever. And that's your prerogative. Here's my 2 cents is I don't think that you should only do marketing for 6 months of the year, only if you can provide 6 months of the year of service. And the reason is, is because you can build— be building B2B partnerships, you can be optimizing content, you can still be emailing and contacting your customer list. For example, at my home service business, we had shoulder season. January, February, March, slow. Most people have that. However, what I would recommend doing is in January would be pre-scheduling everyone for the year. So everyone in your database in January, you should be contacting them to pre-schedule their service for the year. It depends how you define marketing, but marketing could be email content, could be email blasts, could be social content, could be text message marketing, could be content in general about that. So in January, even though you're not doing the service, you can still be marketing to your customers and prospect list and building referral partnerships. Now, if we're talking about marketing in the sense of running paid ads or doing some type of thing like that, then obviously if you can't do the service now, then don't be running ads to do the service. Wait until you actually need the service. Um, yeah, that'll be my two cents on that. And then most important though, I would try to find a service that you can provide over those other 6 months because you can cross-sell services. People already know they can trust you. Like, there's tons of opportunity there. Um, awesome. I'm live here if you have questions. You got a couple people on Instagram, uh, and YouTube. You could drop a comment. Uh, that's all the questions that I have that are pre-subscribed here. What I will tell you this, um, on Thursdays we're going to be going live. I used to do it on Fridays and I'm switching to Thursdays because it's just much easier for our workflow. And I'm going to try to be as, as real live as possible. And the reason is, so Hormozy recently came out with this, that as we get more and more into this trust recession and we think about Is this real? Is this pre-scripted? Is this, how far down the line of real, real is this? And when we think about the realest thing that we could get, which is live, well, the realest thing we get is face-to-face. But after that is a live thing, like me right now being live, talking to someone, answering questions and giving expertise. There's no other way to build good authority and credibility. And I'm saying this because in your business, if you want to create content or you want to do things, The best thing you can do is be live. There's no way people can question that. Uh, well, I appreciate everyone hanging out today. Again, if you're watching this after the fact, drop some comments and we'll get them on the next live.