How To Transition Your Business From Transactional Marketing To Brand Marketing

If you're looking to take your local service business to the next level, in this video we're going to discuss how to get out of the transactional marketing mindset and start building a brand so that you can scale and ultimately grow and eventually maybe even sell your business. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We partner with local service businesses and we help them increase sales and keep their schedules full. Specifically, we work with local service businesses that are seven figures plus in revenue. And these are some of the strategies that we implement in their business to, to help them grow. So let's get right into it. I'm gonna share my screen here and we're gonna start looking at some of these strategies. So in past videos we've shared this Flash customer journey. And essentially what this is is it's a funnel for your business. And the goal of any business is to ultimately get to a sale. And there's many ways that you can get to a sale. So real quick, I'll give you a quick overview of this and then we're gonna get into this video. So visibility, you can do all of this stuff. You can do SEO, run ads, social media, direct mail, prospecting, calls to get new customers in. Then they come into your business, they come in as a lead, they call you, whatever, fill out a form, schedule an appointment, get a proposal, and then ultimately get a sale. Now on the other side of this, which a lot of businesses miss, is this retargeting, which is asking for reviews, getting referrals, monthly newsletters, staying in touch with them, bringing them back into the funnel, and then coming through on the sale. All right, so if you have done transactional marketing, essentially what that is is you are spending money on leads. And a lot of times when people reach out to us to set up meetings, they want to know what is their roi, which is a great question to ask any marketing company. The problem with that question is that a lot of times they're looking at it as Angie or Yelp or Facebook and they're saying if I put $10 in, then I'm going to get X dollars out. Which is very good question to ask a marketing company. But it's not as clear cut with a branding marketing play because when it comes to branding, it's hard to place a value on branding. With that being said though, any branding marketing should generate an roi and the marketing company should be able to articulate what that number is. And we can do that. We've made videos about that before. But I just want to make sure that that's clear, that aside from transactional marketing, brand marketing is more looking at creating a system in your business that's building a brand. So what are some of the problems with your traditional transactional marketing? You have no control over lead flow. You can scale up your how much you spend, but eventually that company like Angie is a big one right now. They could pull, pull back on the quality of their leads. They could also make their leads really expensive. They could partner with another company and change the way that the leads happen and they could farm them out to 10 different people and then you have to try and call them before the next person. So you really have no control over lead flow or you have limited control for now until something changes in that platform and then you have to go searching for the next platform to try and get leads from. It can become very costly. We all know this. You're spending thousands of thousands of dollars and then your rep calls you from that platform and says you need to increase your budget. And then you increase your budget and you're trying to get leads chasing around people and price shoppers. It's low quality leads a lot of the times just people that are looking for information or they're trying to get the lowest price, the cheapest thing. And you're just chasing leads and you're trying to turn and burn all these leads. So I'm sure that you have faced this before. This is a common issue with transactional marketing. And what are the benefits of building a brand? Ultimately you have control over your brand. You have control over the content that you put out there, and you have control over the lead flow. And that is the goal, is that you're building a brand to control the lead flow. You're not reliant on Facebook or of these other platforms to give you leads. You are building a system that generates leads in your business savings. When you're not paying for leads, then you're focused on building a brand which is going to ultimately bring you in leads and it's going to continue to snowball and build a large brand that generates leads at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost you to actually pay for leads. And then the other one, which is this is a really big one a lot of people miss is the quality. So when you build a brand, people are coming to you because they want to work with you. Aside from you having to go out and chase people down to try and work with you. We've seen this in our business. We make videos like this. People that Contact us, say we want to work with you because you seem like you know what you're talking about and you seem trustworthy. And so we want to work with you the other way around, which is us chasing people to try and get them to work with us. It's a different way of doing business. It can take time to get going. And we're going to talk about some of those strategies. But I just want to lay this out as far as the difference between transaction marketing and brand marketing. All right, so how does this work in your business and how can you create this funnel like this? So the number one way that you can start building a brand is by doing this section here, getting reviews, getting referrals, and start a retargeting plan in your business. The reason that this starts building a brand is because you already have people that know, like and trust you that have come through this funnel. And if you're not at this stage yet, I'm going to share with you over here how to do this. But the number one way that we typically see companies doing is that they get through this conversion funnel they get right here. And what happens is once they're done with the sale, the person's gone. Maybe they ask for review, maybe they ask for referral, but there's never any retargeting to bring them back into the funnel. Very rarely do we ever see this. And so what we recommend is to just start building some of these retargeting channels, whether that's a monthly newsletter, a quarterly email to follow up on the service, a text message campaign. And what you do in these is you offer them something, you cross sell a different service, you ask for referrals, and you start really building and nurturing a brand and a community of people that already know, like and trust you. So this is the low hanging fruit of building a brand. A lot of companies though, when they're starting out, the reason that they're in that transaction mindset is because they don't even have any customers coming in and, and they're just trying to get customers coming in the door. And then eventually three, five years down the line they get here and then hopefully they start doing this. So if you're just starting out and you're looking to build a brand, here's how you can do it. And this is a really, really big one that we see a lot of times. And this is to be the subject matter expert in your industry, the go to resource for people to use. So Google has this acronym called eat. They recently added another E eat. And what this is is that you are building content that centers around your expertise, your experience, your authority and your trust. So how does this look for businesses? Let's say you're starting a carpet cleaning company and you're just getting started and you're running some Angie leads, and the leads are okay, but you're still trying to really build a brand. So what if you took this philosophy of creating content and you created content which is your expertise, your experience, your authority and your trust. For example, the ultimate pricing guide for carpet cleaning. The ultimate pricing guide for carpet stretching. The ultimate pricing guide for carpet repair. Carpet repair versus carpet stretching. Carpet pricing versus room pricing. Square wall to wall carpet pricing versus traffic area pricing. If you create content that demonstrates your expertise, your experience and your authority, what this does in your market is that it builds you as the subject matter expert. Now, we don't recommend just turning off the transactional marketing side of things, especially if you're just starting out. Obviously you need leads to come in the door. But what happens is when you create content like that, people that are on these platforms, let's say it's Angie, Yelp, Facebook, Google, whatever, any platform that you're running ads on, they're going to go to your website, they're going to check you out, they're going to read your reviews and they're going to say, is this company someone that I want to do business with? So the first thing that you can do is by having this content on your website, you're going to get better leads coming through the door. Because yes, people are going to turn into a lead on these platforms, but other people are going to go to your website and they're going to say, can I know like and trust this company? And then they're going to contact you and they're going to be a little bit more of saying, I want to work with you. And then once you start getting those people in, getting those reviews is huge. 17% of your ranking on Google is reviews. And so if you can take those reviews and then leverage them and people are online, this is what they do. They go to Angie, they say, oh, this company looks decent. They have good Angie reviews. Let me go and read their Reviews on Google. 98% of people are reading reviews on Google. We found this out in a recent survey. So you need Google reviews. Then they're going to your website and saying, does this website look professional? Do they seem like they know what they're talking about? And you're going to have that awesome content on there. That shows truly who you are. And one side note about your website, be sure to have real pictures, like pictures of real people with your logo and stuff. Don't have any stock photos. You can have some stock photos, but try to have some real pictures of a truck or you with a logo on it. It just goes a long way in building that trust and likability factor on your website. So they're going to do that, they're going to go to your website, they're going to check you out and then they're going to say, okay, I think I want to contact this business. And you're at the mark of building this funnel and building your brand marketing play. Now one other thing about this that I want to make sure that I hit home is this business to business section here. This is a really huge area of opportunity for brand marketing. The reason is, is because transaction marketing is solely focused on paying for this lead, getting this lead, paying for this lead, getting this lead. When you're building a brand, you can 10 times the power that you have by using business to business marketing. What this means is like if you're a carpet cleaning company, why don't you go partner with a bunch of realtors and build the know like and trust factor with these realtors, Maybe even create some content for the realtors and maybe even a special package for them that says, hey, here's a buyer's guide to carpet. Everything they need to know about new flooring, carpets, stretching, repairs. You can give this out in your, in your intro calls that you have. And this sets you up as the know like and trust factor. And so leveraging your B2B. The reason that this is so important is because now you have that realtor who is a salesperson for you that's out in the market that's championing, championing you, that's saying you should work with this company and they're giving out your collateral that's building you as a brand authority in your space. And so you can really leverage this in so many ways. But I would challenge you to think about the difference between transaction marketing and brand marketing. And I would make sure that you're doing a little bit of both at least when you're getting started. All right, if you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. And if you're interested in talking about your business, I'll put a link down below and we'll see you in the next video.