Business is Slow? Do these 3 Things NOW
Phil Risher shares three ways local service businesses can boost revenue during slow periods: retarget existing customers with text and email campaigns (texts have very high open rates), optimize your website funnel to convert 5-10% of visitors into leads, and run paid ads on Google and Facebook while building referral partnerships with realtors and plumbers.
Questions this video answers
December 20, 2022.
About 20–30% (good lists sometimes 40–50%).
About 98%.
Aim for 5–10% (10% used as a specific benchmark).
Approximately 4%.
Chapters
This video, we're going to discuss what to do if business is slow. If you're going into your slow season, January, February, March, we're going to discuss some strategies that you can implement. Three of them, specifically on how to drum up some business. More importantly, if you're just slow in general, whether it's the market or it's business, we're going to discuss ways to revitalize your business and get things going. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting and we work with local service businesses and we help them grow using technology and digital marketing. And in this video, we're going to discuss some of those strategies. So the first thing that you can do if your business is slow, this is the number one thing you can do to drum up business. And that is in this funnel, it's retargeting. So what retargeting is is taking your database or people that have already used you or have come in as a lead before, and retargeting them with marketing material. A lot of times in the past, people would send out postcards to these people or maybe even email blasts, which is good. And we'll discuss the strategy for that. But what we found is that the number one way to get in front of people is through text message marketing. So email marketing gets an open rate of about 20 to 30%. If you're good, sometimes you can get 40, 50%. If you have a really good customer base, text message marketing gets a 98% open rate. Everyone has their phone on them and you can get right in front of them very quickly. So if you are slow, send out a text message marketing campaign. If you don't have text message marketing, there's a bunch of different ways you can get that. Email marketing is another option and I'm going to share with you some of the tactics that you can share share to get people to contact you back, whether it's email or text or whatever you decide to do. So you could say something along the lines of, hey, it's January. We're kicking off the new year and to celebrate 2023, we're giving 23% off to the first 23 people that book an appointment. Great way to get people excited to give a discount during your slow period and get the ball moving forward. Another great idea is to call everyone from 2022 that did not do work with you and say we have an off season special going on where we 10% off. If you're interested right now, it lasts until the end of January. And you can get the special to get this work done. Another really good one is to do a winter or some type of service that specializes in the winter. So let's say you do roofing. You could do a winter roof inspection. So that way in the spring you're prepared or something like that, which is a really, really great way for retargeting. And again, this is not just retargeting your past customers. Any prospects that have come into your business, put them in there and retarget them. What we usually recommend is you can call all these people, which is great, it's going to be hard to get in front of them. Email. We recommend doing emails every week, bi weekly or monthly, depending on your service and the business that you do. Or even quarterly for some businesses. And then text message marketing, we recommend at maximum, quarterly. No one wants to get junk text all the time with specials. And so you have to be very sparing. You have to use them very sparingly and be very effective when you use them. So that's what we would recommend for retargeting. All right, so that is the biggest pop. You can get a huge ROI on your marketing spend because it's fairly inexpensive to do. Email, text, voicemail drops, that kind of stuff. From the conversions perspective, this is going to be the second area of opportunity. And this is going to be a way to tighten up your systems and your processes. So a lot of businesses that we meet with, they have website traffic. They've been paying for ads, they've been getting people to their website. But what happens is they're not actually converting the website traffic into leads. And what we found is that a good number to target is 10%. 100 people come to your website. You should get 10 leads. If you don't know how to come to your website, you can use Google Analytics, you can use a tool like SpyFu, or you can ask your digital marketing company that's providing it. Like, how many people come to my website every month and I should be getting 5 to 10% of these people into leads. Why are we not? And we're going to talk about how to tighten up this conversion funnel. So the first thing that you can do to tighten up your conversion funnel to get more conversions is to set up a chat widget in the bottom corner here of your website that's going to allow people to text you. There's a bunch of tools out there that allow this. But again, the text message marketing thing is huge. But this is going to allow people to convert. So what we Found by just even adding a little widget over here, it increased your conversion rate by 4%. Because what happens is a lot of people, they may not be ready to schedule a full on service. They might not really want to request an estimate, get a call from a salesperson, go through this whole thing. They might just say, hey, do you do this service or can you do this? And they might just want to chat in and get a quick answer. And that's a really good way to start the conversation. So tightening up your conversion. One way is to add a chat widget. The other way is to add an estimate calculator. Now this is a really cool tool. If you do like carpet cleaning, rug cleaning, or even an estimate on painting or something that's like very calculated, where you can put in square feet and it gives you a percent, a price or something that you can select. Like I have three rooms of this and five rooms of this. Or something along those lines is a really good way to tighten up your conversions to get bottom of the funnel. People that are ready to roll, that are interested, that just are looking for a price of the service. All right, and the last one, and this is a little bit down the line, but you can still get a good pop with this. And it's your visibility. And, and probably the quickest way to get visibility for your business is either running an ad or business to business marketing. So I'm going to share both of these. I'll give you a 3A and 3B. So running an ad, you can turn on ads literally tomorrow for your business, whether it's Yelp ads, thumbtack, Google Ads, Google search ads, Facebook ads. There's a bunch of different ads that you could run next door ads, house ads. Angie, there's a bunch of different places you can run ads. So if you want to just turn on ads and start getting leads, those are great ways to get them going. What we found is that Yelp is a little tough because you have to message people back and forth. Google Ads, you can turn them on, but it takes a little bit of time to get up and running because you have to go through Google's learning mode. Facebook ads are really good if you just want leads, but the leads might not necessarily be ready to buy since they're maybe at the top of the funnel just gathering information. But there are ways that you can run ads to just start getting leads in. The 3B is probably one of my favorite one that a lot of people don't use and that is your business to business side of things. So let's say that you do carpet cleaning, for example, and you want to build a relationship with realtors that are out there. And maybe you also offer new flooring and you also tile and grout cleaning. Well, building relationship with realtors will allow them to refer you into their clients. A lot of times Realtors have monthly newsletters that go out to their clients and they might feature you in their newsletter to all their clients and give their clients a special offer like 10%. It's literally like micro influencers. You've probably heard of influencer marketing before. This is micro influence influencers in your market. And it's a really great way to build relationships. So you get referral connections but then leverage their relationships into your company's relationships. So business to business is a hidden gem. Highly recommend that you look into this and think about it for your business. Right. We talked about realtors. Those are really good ones. But there's other ones. Like if you do we talk about carpet cleaning, there might be other opportunities for plumbers. Let's say that a plumber goes in and there's water damage and you do like light water damage for carpet cleaning. That's an opportunity to market just to plumbers, for example. So you could call up the plumbers, you could email them and start building a relationship and maybe give them a referral commission back. So those are three strategies to help you if your business is slow from a marketing perspective, to get you drummed up and get things cranking, especially if you're going into your slow seasons. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We help local service businesses grow. If you need help with your company to come up with strategies to implement these into your business, that's what we do. We strategize with the business, come up with these ideas and then literally implement them and build out all these sales funnels so that it's just working and it's a machine and this funnel is cranking out. So I'll put a link down below. If you're interested, you can set up a free 30 minute strategy session with us and we'll see you in the next video.
