How Long Until Digital Marketing Results | Digital Marketing Costs | Marketing KPIs | Q&A

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're going to do another Q and A where I've curated the top five questions that I was asking when I was in the trades looking for a good digital marketing company. Now obviously own a digital marketing company. And these are a lot of the questions that we get. And I thought, hey, let me make a Q and A where I answer these top five questions about digital marketing that a lot of people in the home services, they want the answers to. So let's get right into it. The first question is, how much does digital marketing cost? This is the big question that everyone always asks. So when you look at the main deliverables that come through digital marketing, we look at like SEO. So you have your website SEO and your off site SEO, like your Google business profile. You have website development, so adding pages, blog content SEO, like service area pages to your website. You also have email marketing, social media posting, ppc, like running ads, Google local service ads. So I'm going to kind of break down what these cost. A very simple way to look at this is that if each service that you pay for cost three to $500, if you were to culminate all that together, let's say you're going to do SEO on site, off site, social media content, email marketing, PPC, Google local service ads, that's five things. Let's say it's 500 bucks. That should be 2,500 bucks is typically what something like that will cost with PPC pay per click. Google search ads. Typically when you look at Google search ads, there's two different schools of thought on this. One you could charge a flat fee of like, hey, I'm going to charge you 200 bucks and I'm going to run your Google search ads. Or some companies charge a percentage. If you spend $10,000, we're going to charge you 15 or 20%. 1500 bucks, 2000 bucks to manage that $10,000. So those are two different ways to look at it. Now if you take those five things that I mentioned and it's 500 bucks each, that's 2,500 bucks. What are some other reasons why things could cost more than that? Let's say that someone doesn't just do generic reporting, but they actually use your data and handwrite reports. Let's say someone meets with you on a monthly basis. Let's say that you have someone's cell phone number and you can communicate back and forth with them. They use your CRM they get into your CRM. Also, if they do more customization of building out certain things for you, like automations with your CRM, text message marketing technology platforms that your team can use, you kind of get the gist. You have your basic like vanilla thing, which I would say if you do a complete marketing plan is going to be around 2,500 to $3,000. Then when you start layering customizations and expertise and maybe even a consultant or account manager, that's very high touch, then you know it can go up to 4, 5, 6, $7,000 a month. So depending on how you fit in. So that's a good barometer for what digital marketing should cost. The next question that we're going to look at is how long does it take to see results? This comes up again, okay, if I'm going to be spending 3,000, $4,000 a month, well after three months I'm going to spend $12,000. What am I going to see for the results side of things? So let's dive into this a little bit. On our channel we talk about our flash customer journey and there's really three pillars. There's visibility, conversions and retargeting. So from a visibility perspective, usually this one takes a little bit longer to see results. Visibility is like SEO running Google Ads, social media content on site, off site SEO. So managing your Google business profile, building out service area pages, blog content on your website, optimizing it for local SEO. The reason that that usually takes a long time. You hear SEO takes a while to get going. Ads, running Google Ads, it doesn't necessarily take a long time because you set them up and then you start getting traffic to your site. But what does take time is the back and forth between, okay, we got this data, but did it actually turn into actual leads and then ultimately sales, it takes time to go through that cycle and then to take the data back to the team and say, okay, this worked, this didn't work. This was my conversion rate. This was my conversion rate. So usually the visibility side, I would say you're going to take about three to six months to see any tangible results. If you're building a website simultaneously, it could take even longer, like six to 12 months to see some type of a return on your investment. From visibility. Specifically, when we talk about conversions, this one, usually it's a little bit quicker than that. What conversions are is when someone comes to your website, how do they convert into a lead and then from a lead to a booked appointment, from a booked appointment to an estimate and Then an estimate to a sale. And this conversion funnel, you can set up automations and things like for example someone comes to your website, you could add a chat widget to your website, you could add an estimate calculator to your website, you could add a quick, quick form where people fill out a quick seven second form to turn into a lead. All of these conversion tools, they can be added to a website within a month and then the next month you'll be able to get the data from that and you'll have quicker results because you're already right now getting the traffic to your website and you're just not converting the traffic into leads. That's why usually the conversion side of the funnel, the middle section of leads to sale by tweaking this and working on this side of things, UX ui, it's user experience and user interface, those are the different ways to look at this. And then CRO conversion rate optimization, that's going to be like two months, three months. You should start to see return from a conversion rate perspective of an increase in your conversion rate from leads or traffic to your website into leads. And the last part to this which is retargeting and this one is you should see immediate results with retargeting. What retargeting is, is doing email marketing, text message marketing, reaching out to your database, the prospects or customers that are sitting there in your customer list that have never been reached out to or you maybe you were reaching out to them, but now you have a good game plan of an email newsletter, a voicemail drop, a text campaign that's going to them. The reason that we say that this is usually the fastest is because you have let's say 5,000 people sitting there that you've never contacted before. Now you're about to send them an email and have a call to action in there, you should start to see immediately that some type of lead flow tractions return coming into your business. So with that being said, holistically, within six months, six to 12 months, there's no way that you can't prove out is this working or it's not working. Visibility, which is the front end, which a lot of people are more so looking at digital marketing for lead flow on that side of things could take a good six months, but you could just go in and tweak someone's website and see a ranking increase right away that doesn't necessarily correlate to increased rankings, into increased website traffic, into increased leads, into sales. So it takes a little bit to play out as well. All right, the third question that we have on here is how do you measure the success of a digital marketing campaign? So very similar to the results side of things, how do you actually know if this is working or not? And this is a question that if you haven't asked your digital marketing company or someone that you're thinking about working with, you should ask them this. How do you evaluate your performance? And I'll give you a quick, high level overview. When it comes to SEO, you want to make sure that they're tracking their rankings. So how are you making sure our ranks are going up or going down to then benchmark your performance? When it comes to any ad spend, how are you pulling a return on ad spend for the money that we're spending on ads? How are you knowing that? How do you know that that's actually producing a result? Are you going into my CRM and pulling the data when it comes to like your conversion rate optimization, the conversion section, how are you tracking my website traffic into leads? Are you doing a conversion rate and saying, we got a hundred people to the website, we got 10 leads, that's 10%. How are you tracking that performance? Which these are all things that they should be saying that they're doing to benchmark their performance. And ultimately this was what I landed on when I was at the digital marketing company was that we need a company that's going to get into our CRM and pull the data because you can't be reliant on an office manager or, or even, you know, the owner of the business to try to figure out is this working or it's not. It should be on your digital marketing company to tell you this is working or it's not working. And here's why. Based off of your data, that's really the clarity that you want and the granular analysis that you want from these companies. Number four, what makes a digital marketing company different from others? Very, very simple. As I mentioned before, doing all the work. If you look at those $500 increments, let's say it's 2500 bucks. It's very standard for a digital market to do all the digital marketing tasks for 2,500 bucks. And there's so many digital marketing companies out here that do this stuff. A lot of times anyone can post on your social media account, anyone can do SEO. It's not rocket science. But what makes companies different? I would say the big thing is the level of customer service that they provide. One thing, like at my company, I hated this was when I Had a support email that I had to email to make changes. So like, we vow to never have a support email that anyone ever communicates with because we don't want people reaching out to support at. We want them to have a consultant to say, hey, this is your person that knows your business, that can give you coaching back and forth and work together on a solution. So that's one thing that can make a company different. How do I make updates or who do I contact or how do I do this? If they say support, not a bad thing. It's just that's something that might be different. Their level of service is not there. The other thing is your reporting. Very similarly. I was frustrated because we were getting automated reports. It would just send me a data dump of all of our stuff that was just regurgitated and put into some type of AI spreadsheet and then sent to me. And then it was on me to try to analyze things. Or I would get on a call and they would just run through all these random numbers. I'm like, I don't care about any of that stuff. It doesn't make. It doesn't help me grow my business. It's just numbers. So someone that would take the time to analyze your data in your CRM and then give you a custom report based off your data and pair them together to make it very easy for you to understand. Again, that is something that stands out. One of the big things I was recently on a podcast and I mentioned this was go and read their reviews. If there's a digital marketing company that doesn't have reviews, that's a red flag. If they don't have blog content on their website, if they don't do email newsletters, if they don't have social media content, all of these things, if they don't do it for themselves, how do you know that they're going to do it for your business effectively if you don't see any remnants of them doing it? It's like you have a carpet cleaning company that has dirty carpets, you have H Vac company that has no ac. You know the basic things that you should be doing for yourself. And so that's how you can see companies that are different. It's the level of service, level of reporting, and also case studies too. If they don't have any case studies of your industry or even a similar type of industry with, with reviews that people have said, hey, this company, this is actually legit. And they did this for me, that's a really big one. A lot of Times companies just jump into digital marketing because it seems like an easy way to make money. There's not actually any real thought behind how this impacts a business. All right, and then the last one is, if there was going to be one strategy that you would implement in a home service business, what would it be? And I'm going to give you two, not just one. So the first one is I would do B2B partnerships. The reason that B2B partnerships are huge is because you can get referrals in. And we made content about this before, but I was on a podcast and he asked me like, hey, what's one low hanging fruit that most people don't talk about? And that's building referral partners. If you do H Vac and you don't do plumbing, well, go find a plumbing, a bunch of plumbing companies that can refer you H vac work. Then they don't have to do the H Vac work and you don't have to do the plumbing work and you can refer it out and each of you are going to make money. Same thing with building realtor partnerships, building property management, restoration contractors. Right? All these people, they're in people's homes, they're talking to people they need to refer business in. So build that partnership. And then the second thing that I would recommend is what I talked about a little bit before, which is the retargeting piece. A lot of times all of your customers are sitting there in this big blue ocean honey hole. They already know, like and trust you. You just need to invite them to come back into your funnel and work with you again. It is a digital marketing function, but it's not a traditional digital marketing function that people think about, which is why I wanted to share that as well. So. So if you have a question, drop a comment below. We do free marketing audits. So if you're interested in doing a free marketing audit, we'll put a link down below. We hop on a call for 30 minutes, talk about your business. Whether we work together or not, it's all good. And if not, it's all good. Hit like and subscribe. We'll see you in the next video.