How to Keep the Phones Ringing in Slow Season (Even When Leads Dry Up) Q&A

How can we keep phone calls and leads coming in during the slow season? This is a question that every single person has, especially when you get into your shoulder season. I used to face this when I was at a $3 million home service business. We had our shoulder season, which was February and March. And every single time that we would come to the shoulder season, the business owner who had been running for 20 years would say, oh my gosh, we're going into our shoulder season, what do we do? So I highly recommend that you, you come up with a game plan. And here's what I would do this. What we did was first off, any big estimates that we didn't sell the year before, we had a promo offer that we would use during the shoulder season. So all the estimates that we didn't sell, we put them into a promo offer and in February and March we'd hit them up and say, hey, right now we have bandwidth to do this job. We'll give you 10% off so that we can do it. Now the second thing is you want to prepare for the season. So if you sell an estimate when you're really busy, you want to ask the question of when do you want to get this installed? Is it okay if we do this in the shoulder season? Because you have time to actually get the work done. So preparing for the shoulder season, knowing that you're going to be slow is very important. The other thing that's so important to this is having some type of an offer or something that you're going to sell during the shoulder season and having a way to get the message out there. So that's going to look like a text blast, an email blast, or some type of an offer that going to be able to drum up business during this time. Some of the most popular ones that we've seen is like an H vac is all the people that didn't schedule their fall inspection, they're going into winter and they're going to get crushed because they're going to get a freeze and then they're not going to have any heat. So giving them a second offer which is, hey, we see that you didn't schedule your fall inspection. We want to be proactive about the freeze that's coming up and we want to give you 50% off of our normal dispatch fee or, or a fall tune up or whatever that sounds like and we're going to be in your area next week. So having an offer like that, that makes sense and having the right audience to show that offer too. The other last Piece of this is that I believe that slow season or shoulder season is a lot of mindset and the mindset for a lot of business owners just, it is what it is. It's going to be this way. This is what we have to do. And I would push back a little bit that there's probably other things that you could do. And don't just fall into the shoulder season is what it is. Try to be proactive about a solution for that. Next up, are there quick wins campaigns, sms, email, rehashing old estimates that could generate immediate leads. All the things that I just said about running this stuff in, in your shoulder season, do that whenever you need quick win campaigns. So we had 13 routes that we were running. We had 28 technicians that we had to keep busy. And what we would do, we have gaps in our schedule. So it would be like a week out, two weeks out. What do we do tomorrow? We don't have these schedules filled. So the first thing that we did was we had a call ahead board. So people that scheduled out for a week, we would ask them in the intake process, hey, if we have a cancellation, would you like to move up? That would be the instant people that we would reach out to and move them up. Second is all the leads that we just worked. So we got a bunch of leads in and they didn't close. We would go back through and hit those really hard. Like I'm not just talking texts and emails, but actual calls for our CSRs to book jobs. The last piece of this that we did was we set up a job board for all of our CSRs so that they would know a goal to hit jobs so we would incentivize them to hit a certain number of jobs. Last year we did 500 jobs. This year we did 600 jobs. So let's push the team to get more jobs on the books so that way they care. And it's not just me as the owner trying to be reactive, but having them have some skin in the game to get more jobs on the books. As far as campaigns you can run, yes, run a text campaign that says, hey, we're going to be in your area tomorrow doing an estimate and want to see if we could stop by. Or tomorrow doing X, Y and Z. Same thing with the email campaign. We're going to be in your area works really good because people are like, oh, they're already going to be here. Let me just have them stop by and do this. And it just sounds very natural and organic. All right, when is the best time to launch these campaigns. Does it make sense to do it in your slower season or to be proactive in fall so to get people ready to go for, for the slow season? All right, when it comes to text, what you do not want to do is send out a text to people and, and every like month or week, right? You got to do this like over probably two or three times a year max. You don't want to overload people with text for campaigns. It's going to be very frustrating for them. It's also going to be overload for them and they're probably going to unsubscribe and say leave me alone. So what we recommend doing is maybe two times a year max having some type of a promo text that goes out and have it so that it's within a seven day window, maybe a month long. Like if you give them an offer and say this is good for the rest of the month. But you don't want to just be like, you know, hey, get ready for winter and, and start thinking about X, Y and Z. There's no, you're wasting a text on that. What you want to do is be like, hey, we're going to be in your area next week or we have this promo going on for the rest of February and we're giving X dollars off and we want to get you on the schedule. Reply why or one and we'll take it from there. So you want to use the SMS campaigns very wisely and you don't want to burn your bridges with no offer and just sending them out to people. All right, let's see. Next question we got here is on ad. So is it worth testing broad match keywords again given rising cost per clicks or will that dilute lead quality? Okay, so we talked about this before on our channel, but if you're running Google Ads, there's a couple of different ways you can do that. You can do broad match keywords, exact match keywords, phrase match keywords. What you need to know as a business owner is this. If you run broad match keywords, it's going to do what it sounds. It's going to match your ad with broad range of keywords. So let's say someone searches for gutter cleaning. Then a broad match keyword could pair you with DIY gutter cleaning or how do I clean my gutters? You as a business don't want to be shown for those because it's not people searching for gutter cleaning companies or gutter cleaning service. That's why broad match keywords are usually not the best because they are cheap leads that are not the best quality, cheap clicks that are not the best quality. And a lot of times it's not your target audience. So if you run more Exact Match or phrase Match keywords, it gives you more specific people that are clicking on your ads that are then going to go to your website. That also means that they're more expensive because people are competing on those keywords and everyone knows that those are the best leads, so they're the most expensive. So do you want to play around with this? Here's my two cents on it. If you're going to play around with it, don't let it linger. And work with a company that knows what they're doing. Because you could just set up all your keywords on Broad Match and you're just going to get a bunch of trash and junk and clicks and you're going to spend the money on a black hole of Google, which maybe you have as a business owner. You need to have someone that's looking at the numbers at least weekly to say, okay, now this doesn't make sense, let's get rid of this. Because you're just getting a bunch of leads or clicks for things that you don't want. So you could open it up to Broad Match, but it's not my recommendation. My recommendation would be to the leads that you get. They're going to be warm leads and much more qualified. So you need to work on closing those leads at a, at a higher clip. And of course, you got to track it all the way through. Another thing about ads. So is it more effective to run retargeting display ads or should we first focus our budget on search campaigns before we do retargeting? All right, so there's ads out there that you can run where if someone goes to your website, then you could. I'm sure you've been followed around by Amazon. You go to Amazon, you look at something, then you go somewhere else and you see pictures of all the Amazon stuff that you were looking at. This is the same thing for your home service business. Someone goes to your website, then they don't end up converting into a lead. Then they go on Facebook and they see a retargeting ad and says, hey, come back. Wait a sec, come back. That's called retargeting. It is a strategy. It's. I would say that it's not the best strategy to get new customers coming in. Because what we found is that 87% of people are going on Google Then once they go onto the website, they're already 80% of the way there. They've already done a little bit of research or they go onto your website. Especially if it's like an instant click on a Google Ad, like they're going right to your website, they're going to turn into a lead when they go to your website. So the retargeting ads, could it be a nice way to kind of capture people that don't convert? Sure. I would recommend taking that budget and focusing more on new people that are on Google and maxing that out first before you move up the stream to running these retargeting ads. They're not that expensive. But it's also like if they didn't go to your, if they went to your website and they didn't convert, like something's wrong. Especially if you do a service that's not like super, super high ticket, that's just like, hey, I need my gutters cleaned or I need my windows washed or I need pressure washing or I need duct cleaning. Those jobs doesn't make sense for someone to retarget. If you're doing big ticket, you know, decks remodels, people do their, their research and they're educating themselves on what's going on in the market. So it could be nice to have, I would say that it's, it allows you to match, okay, these people saw us and now they see us here. Now they see us here. It has, it lets you build more authority. But I would say that if you're trying to get new customers coming in, the best way is to run traditional Google search ads and then run those maybe as a nice to have kind of thing to build authority and brand awareness down the line. All right, last one we have here for ads for LSAs, Google Local Service ads. When is the right time to extend our ad schedules to 247 once the AI receptionist is live. So on Google LSAs in particular, that's the first section on Google that has the Google guaranteed. And these are pay per lead. So what that means is when someone clicks the button to call, that's when you're charged for the lead. And that's when Google gets paid. Which is a very important thing because if you don't answer the phone and someone calls you, Google does not get paid. And they hate that because they, that's the only way they make money. And they're putting you in the number one spot on Google. So if you do not answer your phone when Google Local service ads calls, they will stop Showing you they will not, they do not want to show you because they're not going to make any money. They're showing a good profile that's getting clicks but no one's answering, so they're not making any money. So this is why it's so important to make sure that your hours are right so that you have someone who answers the phone. So that way you get more Google local service ads by doing the right stuff. So this question is asking about should I wait to do it a 247 so my AI receptionist is live? Yes. Don't turn it on now because if you miss out on the calls, then yeah, you're going to miss out on all the opportunities that follow because Google's going to not is going to be upset that you didn't answer the phone because they didn't make money. All right, next section we have here is on content. So would creating separate residential versus commercial service pages improve SEO rankings and conversion or should we optimize the current mix pages first? So anytime you're creating content, there's what's called service area pages. This is basically building this web around your business. You have, let's say you do H Vac repair, H Vac service, you have H Vac service in Dallas, Texas, then you have H Vac service in Fort Worth, Texas and you're building this map around your business with all these different service area pages. However, when you get through, you know, your top 10 or 20 cities, you could continue to build out more cities. But does it make sense to then refocus on another service that you offer or big, large product or go residential commercial and focus on the residential stuff and then on the commercial stuff. That's basically what this question is asking about. And my recommendation would be to look at your business mix. If you are heavy commercial or if you want to really get into commercial, then yes, segment it out. If it's like eh, it's nice to have, but I really want to focus on residential, then move to a higher ticket service. So in this H Vac repair situation, everyone wants H Vac service calls, but people also want installation. Of course you want installation jobs. It's just the service calls are going to lead to the installation jobs. However, you could go and create H Vac replacement installation in Dallas, Texas, H Vac replacement and installation in Fort Worth, Texas. And now you have a more specific page focused on a specific keyword that someone could be searching. So to answer the question, I think that it depends on your business mix. If you want to focus on residential and then also build out commercial. If that's a big part of your business or a big area of opportunity for you, then yeah, do residential and then do commercial and have two separate pages. It's going to be better for SEO and it's going to give specific keywords that people can land on. But if you are like, it's nice to have, but it's not our bread and butter, then focus on your next big tier ticket item that you want to focus on. How do we best use high income neighborhood data to guide our SEO service area paid strategy? So like I was just mentioning about building out these service area pages. Service area pages are good to have and you would probably know your business. Okay, I want to target this city, this city, this city, this city. What we do as a business is we come up with our top 10 target areas and then we list them from 1 through 10 most important and go down the list. Now with, if you have data based off of the high income people, then you probably want to target them first. So inside of the service area pages or whatever content that you're building out, you probably want to focus on the high income people and then go from there. One note on this, if the high income people are an hour away and you have other markets that you want to serve that's closer, then obviously don't do this because maybe you want to build a map out and it's nice to have these people, but I don't want all my customers over here. And that's how you can have a blend. Obviously that's what we do as a consulting company is like figure out what is what makes the most sense from a mix perspective. But that's how you can layer in additional information and into your SEO strategy. All right, should we build a dedicated pricing page with base rates to make it easier for Google AI tools to scrape, even though we already have a calculator? All right, so this company probably has an estimate calculator on their website, which is good. You should have an estimate calculator on your site. Even if it's just generic stuff. It allows you to capture leads and it gives people some momentum in solving their problems. When people come to your website, they want to know two things. How much is it going to cost? When can you do it? So if you give them some type of an estimate pricing calculator, it doesn't have to be exact but some type of a pricing guide, it allows you to convert the lead and give them something in return. Now this question specifically is asking about dedicated pricing page with base rates. And yes, my recommendation would be to have a page on your website or a blog post or whatever you want to call it that educates the customer on a pricing guide. That could be what makes the price go up, what makes the price go down, what's good quality, what's bad quality, what to look for when hiring someone, what are some add ons, what should it overall cost you? There's two reasons why you should have this. One, they mentioned here Google and AI tools. Yes, it's going to scrape that information. It's going to help you stand out as the authority, which is good. Two, well, three things. Two, it's going to help customers come to your website and say wow, this company is actually putting it all out there. It's going to build a lot of trust and authority with them. But the third one, a lot of people don't think about this. This is probably the most important thing. Why you should do this is because when someone calls in and they say hey, how much does it cost to do this? Or I'm trying to get some estimates or pricing and if they want to, if they want you to give it the price over the phone, even if they want you to give them the price over the phone, get something in return, an email address and send them your pricing guy. You could say, hey, before we get off this call, I'll be able to give you an estimate or an idea of what this looks like. I also want to send over our pricing guide. We put this together to, to cut through all the noise and give you the most information. What email should I send that over to? This will allow you to then start some type of a nurture sequence and keep the conversation going while also allowing you to leverage this content in your day to day experience. You might get 30 leads from your website, but you're going to get way more calls that come in and you need to have your CSR team being able to leverage this tool as well to continue the conversation as they're nurturing these leads or estimates or customers. Same thing in your estimate process. If you give someone an estimate on a job and they say cool, I have to think about it. Now you can introduce your pricing guide and why you came up with this price and what to look for. It builds a lot of trust and credibility and helps you convert jobs much better. All right, so that's our question, our Q and A session here. Again, if you have a question, we're going to go back through these comments and you can also go to flashconsulting.com and ask questions. Hope this was helpful. I'll see you in the next video.