Branding vs Marketing for Local Business Lead Generation - Which is Better?

All right, in this video we're going to talk about branding and marketing and transactional marketing. What's the difference how you can leverage both of these tools in your business? And also what's going to be the thing that moves the needle the most for your business, especially going into a new year or planning for your next move. Real quick. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And on this channel we talk about growing local service businesses. So if you like stuff like this, hit like and subscribe and you'll get all of the content. All right, so let's look at this together. So we, we share this funnel a lot and we always come back to it because this is really all the marketing stuff. You create visibility for your business, you convert that visibility into leads and then you retarget your past prospects and customers and bring them back into your funnel. We made tons of videos about this before. In this video we're going to talk a lot about visibility because there's really two ways that you can get more visibility for your business. You can build a solid brand in the marketplace and or you can run transactional marketing, which is more of your pay per lead type of stuff. So let's look at some of the strategies for branding and what this means real quick. Before I get into this, the reason that this video came up was because we did a prospecting call with a company. They're an eight figure business and their marketing budget on a monthly basis was pretty high. And they gave us the breakdown of all their marketing budget and literally less than 10% of their marketing budget was focused on transactions. It was all focused on branding, which a lot of times when people are starting out, they focus so much on transaction that they don't do any branding. And so it's just to go to show you, a lot of times I share on this channel, like, hey, these big companies, they're not just paying Angie for more leads, they're building a brand in the marketplace and then they're leveraging that brand to get more clients. It does take longer. You do have to have a great product. But I'm sharing this because on that example they need to do more transactional marketing to get more leads instead of just focusing all on brand. So let's look at the difference of these two things. So when we look at branding, there are many ways that you can do branding for your, your company, right? You can create logos like this, you can get wall art for the office, you can wrap your trucks. But just some common examples that we've seen from a digital perspective when it comes to branding. You can get Google reviews. This is great for your digital reputation and for branding purposes. For when people search on Google and they find you and they reach reviews, it's building a solid brand online. Yelp, you can do all the stuff on Yelp account to fill it out and post pictures, that kind of stuff. Whatever the platform is, you know, fill out all the stuff on Angie. You can get reviews, you can respond in a specific amount of time. All of this is just building your brand online, digitally building a solid brand. So these are all things that you can do. You can't pinpoint one of these things and say that it's going to lead to a transaction. But what it is going to do is to build a solid brand online. So when people are looking or thinking about a company that they want to use, they're going to evaluate your brand. The other things are billboards, TV and radio. So these ones are very common and they're very expensive. And a lot of times people that we know, like Tommy Mello or other big people in the industry, they don't look at this at all as transaction. They don't even put tracking numbers on these or QR codes or anything. All that they're doing is, is just branding. So the way that they look at this is I'm going to spend $50,000 on a billboard and when someone thinks about they need a plumber, then they're going to remember that billboard because they see it every single day on their commute. And then they're going to go to Google and instead of searching for a plumber near me, they're going to search for that company and they're going to find my Google business profile and they're going to call me, or they're going to find my website and they're going to call me. And that is how billboards, TV and radio create branding. Can you use this more as transactional and put tracking codes or special offers and that kind of stuff? You can. But at the end of the day, this is really just building branding, getting your getting in front of people's eyeballs to show your brand. Think your big companies like Coke, Pepsi, right? Do you have ads all over the place and it's all branding. They're not out here saying like, you know, cold calling you, saying, hey, do you want to get the new iPhone? No, they're just building a solid brand. Other Ways you can do this is by creating content. So you can create blog content that's exceptional. You can create video content that exceptional. You can do email newsletters that are exceptional. A really good book for this is called they Ask youk Answer, which is essentially writing such great content or creating such great videos that when someone is searching for a question, then you are creating the top content that's answering that and then creating a solid brand. So just like this YouTube channel, most YouTube channels, they are a branding tool. It's not a transaction tool. Right. I can make a video about this. I don't know if I'm going to get any leads from it or it's going to turn into a sale. More importantly, I'm just creating a solid brand because I'm doing a good job by teaching people things about marketing their local service business. If they want to work with us, they can. If not, it's just building a solid brand out in the marketplace. And then the last thing this one goes, a lot of people miss this one, is that the best marketing is a great product or service. It's very, very easy to market something that's exceptional. It's really hard to sell or market something that's not good. And so if you don't have a good product or service, then it's going to be really, really hard to sell and market that. And that's why I put customer service in here, because customer service really is building a solid brand in the marketplace. And it takes a lot of time and goodwill to do good customer service. Now if you do plumbing, H Vac, a lot of these trades type of services, what's the difference between you doing plumbing and someone else doing plumbing? There might be things that you might be able to know, but the customer's perception is it's all about the service that's there. Now there might be different products that you can offer and different things that you could do. But again, it's all about the service and that's building a solid brand. So we look at branding. The company that I mentioned before, eight figure business. They're spending a ton of money on branding. They're doing billboards, tv, radio, they're doing, creating custom videos, writing all this blog content. They have a blogger on staff, they have a video editor, they have three video editors on staff, right? They're focusing a lot. Heavy, heavy, heavy branding. They're in the clipper magazines, they're in every single association magazine, they're in every single publication that's in their area. They're sponsoring Sports teams, they're all, they're doing all that stuff. And all this is branding. What happens is, yeah, you create a solid brand, but you also don't have that steady lead flow if people are not in the market and they're not jumping on it. And so that's why there's also another side of this, which is your transactional marketing. So let's look at some of these things. So transactional marketing is paying for leads that could be paying on Angie, Yelp, Google local service ads, running Google search ads to your website and tracking your conversion, your cost per conversion, running thumbtack ads, et cetera. Anything that's paying for leads is transactional. This could also be joining a BNI and getting referrals, building B2B relationships, doing cold calling. So cold calling your past prospects and customers, sending out mailers, going door to door, doing social media ads. All of these are transactional marketing, which is finding people that have your need and connecting you to them. They don't know of a brand that can solve that problem for them. Right. They don't know about Apple, they don't know about Coke yet, they don't know about whatever that brand is. And so we're trying to connect the dots for them through transactional marketing. Now, why is this beneficial from a branding perspective? Yes, it's good to build a solid brand. However, if you can go to the source of this person needs a plumber and they don't know a good plumber and they're asking Angie for a good plumber and Angie's recommending me. That's a great connection. That can happen very quickly where branding, the person has to drive by your billboard for six months and then randomly their toilet starts to leak and they need a plumber and then they remember, oh, I saw this, and then they call you. Branding takes a lot of time to build a solid brand. So you have to have a balance between transactional and brand marketing. On the flip side of this, we work with other companies that have literally just focused on branding for the last 30 years and their transactional marketing, they spend less than half a percent of their revenue on transactional marketing because they don't need anything. All of the brands, all Google reviews, Yelp, all these things are leading right back to that company. So why do they need to spend money on transactional? Because at the end of the day, it's all going to lead back to them anyways because they're the big brand in the area. So if you're a small company, you're looking to scale your business. A lot of times where I find people get stuck is they're focusing so much on this. They're just running from the next ad platform to the next ad platform, trying to spend more money to get more leads. And it's not bad. But you have to make sure that you're also doing the thing to build a solid brand in the marketplace. And I'm not saying you have to spend $50,000 on billboards, TV and radio, but you want to make sure that you're doing everything from a digital reputation perspective. Specifically, just get Google reviews and build an online reputation that correlates so that when someone asks Google, Google says, hey, work with this company. And the second thing is also, like, give great customer service, because by doing that, you're going to get a lot of referrals. You're also going to be able to build a solid brand in your marketplace and, and you're going to be able to keep customers coming back over and over again. So if this video was helpful, be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you have a question or comment about what I said, drop a comment below. I'm curious to get your thoughts and I'll see you in the next video.