How to scale your service business through marketing

In this video, we're going to discuss how to scale your business and get out of the transaction mindset and get into the branding mindset and how you can do that for your business. Real quick. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We partner with local service businesses and we help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And in this video, we're going to share some of the strategies and mindset tricks that these businesses are doing to focus more on brand marketing and transactional marketing. And one of the big things that we found is that transaction marketing is paying for leads. You go to Angie, you go to Yelp, you go to Facebook, whatever, and you pay for leads. The big, big problem with this strategy and what we found with smaller businesses is that if Angie changes one thing or Angie gets bought out by HomeAdvisor or Yelp changes one thing and your leads get shut off, then essentially your business gets shut off because now you don't have any more leads coming in. And this is why it's so important to focus on brand marketing and layer in your transactional marketing, opposed to focusing on transaction marketing and then just doing branding as it comes along. Because eventually, you know, typically it takes a couple years, but your brand starts to build a snowball that starts to just roll and roll and roll, and you layer in your transaction marketing on top and people get stuck into your brand marketing strategy. And so in this video, we're going to discuss what that strategy looks like and how you can implement these into your business while maybe you are scaling through your transaction, but you're really building a brand marketing strategy, and that's really what you want to get to. All right, so let me share my screen here. So this is our Flash customer journey, and we've shared this in videos before, but essentially what this is is it's a professional marketing system that we drop into businesses that we work with, and it creates this brand marketing strategy with a layer of ads into it. And so you can see here, see an ad or pay for lead. A lot of times small businesses, they focus on this or small one, you know, man, in advance type of stuff. They focus on running ads, getting leads, fighting those leads, closing them at 10 or 20% and then getting a sale. And. And then going back to that lead source, fighting for leads, getting a sale. And if you're stuck in that, it's terrible. And what happens when this lead source dries up and then you're scrambling to go to the next lead source, fight for those leads do this sale. And it's a never ending cycle of being small and getting stuck. And so that's why we made this video to help you with brand marketing that you can layer in and you can pay for leads and then layer in brand marketing. So what is brand marketing? Brand marketing is building a brand and a consistent message and image of your business that will last for years to come. It doesn't matter if we're in a recession, it doesn't matter if a lead source dries up. It doesn't matter if a competition comes in. What matters is that you're building a brand in your local market that will withstand the test of time. And that does not mean just paying for leads because again, they can just dry up. So how do you build a brand in a local business? For local businesses, the first thing that you want to do is you really want to focus on this visibility side and taking ads out of it. Organic search online and business to business marketing is really the two crucial parts of it. And so organic search online, this is like people go to Google, they search for you and what do they find? So having a Google business profile, which we made videos about, that getting Google reviews, which is probably the number one thing you can do to build your reputation online, is getting positive Google reviews and then responding to those reviews and posting pictures. If you do those things, building your reputation and your brand online, it's going to work. And one of the big things that we found is that literally a stat just came out. 98% of people are looking at reviews before they make a decision. And so if you're just running ads and then you're fighting those leads to try to get to a sale, those leads are looking at your reviews, those leads are going and looking you up online before they say yes, because everyone does it, 98% of people do it. And so if you actually build your reputation and your brand online and it's going to help you convert these leads better. And so building out your Google business profile, building out your Yelp, building out your Facebook, actually posting on your social media accounts, people always say, oh, I don't get any leads from Facebook, I don't get any leads from these different platforms that I post on social media, you actually do. You just don't know it. Because people don't say, oh, I found you on Facebook or I found you on this. They're doing their research and their homework and it's checking another box that this company is legit and they're not going to screw me over. And and take my money and run. And that's why it's so important. The other thing I did mention was business to business marketing. This is crucial with building referral sources so you can run ads and you can get leads and then you can close the sale. But what if there was a way that you could sell one time and you could get leads forever? And that is what business to business marketing is. Which is why it is important for businesses to build those relationships. And how can this, how does this look? Let's say you're a carpet cleaning company, you build relationships with local realtors, or you build relationships with local restaurants, or you build relationships with local restaurant chains. Whatever it is, this strategy right here is a one time sale that will just continue to give you business for years to come potentially if you do a good job. So on this visibility side, brand marketing is really honing in your reviews, your messaging and posting things that people will say, yes, this company is legit. One of the other really big components about visibility is becoming a subject matter expert. And the way that you can be the subject matter expert in your industry, specifically in your local market, is by sharing frequently asked questions. If you are transparent about everything, then people start to know like and trust you before they even decide to do business with you. And what we found is that these ads right here, if you're running ads, they can close at 10, 20% and you're fighting people. But if you get organic traffic in and you answer people's frequently asked questions, what we found is that that conversion percentage actually goes up to 30, 40, even 50%. And you don't have to fight on deals. People already have decided that they want to work with. They just need to know how much is it going to cost and when can they schedule the work. And that is what brand marketing is, is that you're building your trust online, not talking to someone, but through your online reputation. And then they're coming in as a lead saying, I want to work with this company, I just need to figure out what the price is and when can they do the service. The other part to this is in retargeting. So we just met with this company this week and this is what prompted this video. And what happened was they were paying for leads, getting leads in trying to close a sale. And it was a revolving cycle. They were paying thousands of dollars for ads. And what we found was that they weren't doing a lot of those things that we mentioned up here. But even worse, they were stopping right here. They were doing no retargeting and this company had been in business for like 20 years. And so they had a huge database of customers that they were not building goodwill with. And what does this mean? Obviously you can ask people for reviews, you can ask for referrals, but if, if you do a service and you do other services that people don't know about, let's say you do carpet cleaning, but they don't know that you also do new flooring, or you do kitchen remodeling, but you also do bathroom remodeling. This monthly newsletter allows you to cross sell different services. So that way people that already know like and trust you can either use you in the future or they can share with other people about the great experience that they've had. The other thing is that staying in touch with people, whether it's for birthdays or, or just checking in on a yearly basis or a quarterly basis through texting, it's a really nice way. If you're the salesperson, you say, hey, it's Phil from such and such. Just wanted to check in and see how everything's going. And again, you can automate these processes. But if you're not building this know like and trust factor with your prospects and customers, you're missing out on this whole section of retargeting. Bringing people back into the funnel to ultimately bring them in a sale. And guess what, these returning customers, they, they close way more than 10 or 20%. They close at 60, 70, 80%, which is why it's just low hanging fruit for businesses. And if you can do all this, this is truly building a brand in your business. So what you can do is you can pay for ads, you can run them through your funnel, and then you can start retargeting them to build that lifetime value of your business. And it starts to just create a snowball and a funnel for your business. You can see how this funnel works just like this. And so brand marketing is truly building reputation and brand online, staying in touch with your customers, building referral sources, getting reviews, and ultimately getting your conversion rate up to 50, 60%. So that way you're not at the mercy of Angie Yelp, Facebook, whatever lead source. You're just layering in these lead sources as they become available and as they fade out, you still have this snowball that's working for you, that's generating leads. So if you learned something in this video, you like content about this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses. And if you're curious about taking your business to the next level or the services that we offer. I'll put a link down below and. And we can set up a free call and discuss your business. See you in the next video.