Marcus Sheridan explains why home-service businesses need social media now: AI search pulls from published content, so consistent, helpful posts become your competitive edge. Batch-record 30-45 second clips from call recordings and FAQs, use AI to generate hooks, and get your technicians documenting jobs.
Questions this video answers
The next three to five years.
About 10 to 15 pieces of content.
$49 spring tune-ups.
Endless Customers.
Chapters
Let me be very clear on this though. I believe that social media is going to be the biggest differentiator for home service businesses in the next three to five years, specifically because of the AI search side of things. These large language models that are out here, this AI search, they're literally pulling data straight from content that's being created. So as a business, if you give more input of content from your business standing out as a subject matter expert, these language models are going to say, okay, this company has pretty good reviews, but look at the content that they're creating. This is great content, that's adding value. Boom. And this is the missing piece that's going to sneak up on people, is that if they don't, if they don't take content seriously and they don't want to do it, they're going to miss out on all the opportunity over there.
I was recently a guest on that podcast that you're just watching and we were talking about social media and how it correlates to home service businesses. And I outlined exactly why I believe social media is very important. However, at this point in the conversation, we were talking about search ads and, and Google local service ads and SEO and how home service businesses think, which is, I was the same way. Spend $3,000, make $9,000.
It's all great.
And at this point in the conversation, we start talking about how social media is very hard to correlate any type of return on ad spend, even though we know how important it is. Based off of what I was saying.
Before, here's a problem with social media for home service businesses. Everything that I've said up until this point is all return on ad spend. Very concrete data, numbers, driven to generate leads for your business, right? Social media, throw that out the window because you could be posting for a year and not have any attribution of real leads coming through. You're not going to know that someone knows about you. So they went to Google and searched your name, went to your Google business profile, clicked on your phone number, because they've been following you on social media for years. So the problem is when you talk about social media with home service business, it's so hard to tie the knots together that if you do this, then you get this. And one other big note to this, this guy right here, Marcus Sheridan from they ask, you answer. He had another book that just came out called Endless Customers. There's this layer of being known and trusted company. And a lot of times in the home service space, it's like you're an Electrician, you're an electrician. The only qualifier is review count. This guy has 500 views. This guy has a hundred views. There's a big difference though. When you create content and you show up and serve your client like no other contractor. Here's the five things to look for if you're hiring an electrician. Here's the top five questions that you should ask every electrician. Here's how much it costs to do X, Y and Z. That is a big differentiator for home service businesses that they're missing out on. From a content perspective. When people ask me about social media I'm like, eh, but if they really get that part of branding and building a sustainable brand over years, it can definitely play out in favor, especially with the AI shift.
Yeah, totally. And I, and I do think that there are ways that they can accelerate how effective social media is for them. For me, if you're a local home service business and you are posting on social media and sharing other businesses in the community, whether that just be the place that you went and grabbed a slice of pizza or the deli where you grab your sandwiches or the dry cleaner where you bring the uniforms to or whatever it is, and people see you as the company that's servicing all these local businesses, people are going to notice, take notice of that and you are ultimately going to be the most recognizable name that people think of when it comes to landscaping. And maybe they don't ever go to the Google search because they're just like, hey, I know who I'm going to go to, I'm going to go to this guy because I see the content that they're putting out all the time.
I completely agree with you. The pushback that you're going to get, and this is, this is the hard part is that the guys that are, you know, 0 to 300,000, 500,000 that are in the mud, right, they're out there on the job sites. It's easy, easy for them to make content. A lot of times they're going to be younger too, but they're going to be, it's going to be easy for them to make content on a regular basis. The guys that are running around running these 3, 4, 5 million dollars businesses plus they're just trying to keep, you know, payroll going, routes running. It's hard for them to be a founder led marketing of creating content and go out to these job sites or know these stories. And the hard part is working through your team and your technicians, getting them on board to create content for you and that's the big disconnect is how do you get the time to be able to create this content and get on job sites?
All right, so here's how you can create content in under one hour for the entire month, usually 10 to 15 pieces of content. Here's what we would recommend. Take your call recordings or any other frequently asked questions that you get from your customers. And even if you don't have Those, go to ChatGPT and say, I do.
This service or I want to talk about this Service.
What are 10 hooks or content topics that I should talk about? You get those 10 to 15 hooks, then you get on a zoom or.
Something like this, or just pull out.
Your phone and go through and say the hook. So say most people don't know this, but their H vac system goes out in the summer because of this one reason that's a hook. Then you want to solve, not sell. So you want to solve. Most people don't know that what they should be doing is getting a spring tune up because if you don't change your filter, you don't clean your evaporator coil and you don't have someone who's actually looking at it, your unit could fail.
Basically, you want to solve their problem.
Without selling your service. And this solve time should be about like 30 seconds, 30, 45 seconds. Then you want to have a slight agitation with a call to action. If you're worried about your AC going out this summer, that's the agitation. Then we have a promo going on for $49 spring tune ups. You can message us right here and we'll have a technician come out to your house within the next 24 hours. Whatever your call to action is, then you want to enter it there. And now in about one hour you can have 10 to 15 social pieces ready to roll for you.
That's always the pushback that we get. Some of the ways to get around this is incentivize your technicians to create content for you. Just like you would incentivize them to leave you Google reviews. If they get a Google review, they get 10 bucks. So have them go out and document before and afters and maybe a selfie about what they did at the house. The technicians, you know, along with doing the service of knowing how to fix your H Vac unit, delivering great service to the customer, selling the customer on the things that they need. Now they need to be a social media influencer. This is all the stuff that they're trying to figure out. All these moving parts and come up.
With a process, probably the best thing to do is just find one person in the company that's like really into it and just let them run with it and have that person go out, like, interview some of their clients and stuff like that. That could work.
I'm laughing because here's what they do. They take their customer service representative, who's a young woman, probably in her early 20s, and they say, you're young and you look nice. You need to go out and be on camera and go out and interview people. The problem is, is that if it's not a part of the normal process of what you're doing and you don't have a system in place, you're not going to continue to execute on it. And more importantly, that person's going to have no idea what they're doing. They're just a young person who might know social media, who also might be attractive in some sort.
So listening to that, you know why it's important to do social media based off of AI search? Not only that, it's the best branding that you can do for free online, and if you can do it in an hour or two hours per month, why not start doing it to get ahead of the competition? So if you need help with that, that's something that my company can help you with. If not, hopefully this gave you a roadmap of how to do social media and why it's so important going into the future.
