Hunting & Farming Marketing Strategy 2023 - Local Businesses

In this video, we're going to discuss the difference between hunting and farming when it comes to local service businesses. And we're also going to discuss two different strategies that you can implement in your business. So first, what is the difference between hunting and farming? Simply hunting is outreach. So your company is in the green, you're reaching out to prospects or people to refer you business. Farming is more of building an audience of people that are coming to you saying, hey, I want you to do this. So if you're a carpet cleaning company, you're reaching out to people like restaurants or hotels to clean their carpet. If you are in the farming stage, people are reaching out to you to do the carpet cleaning or at their home or whatever, the restaurant, what have you. And so a lot of times when you're starting out, you're going to have to do a lot of hunting, right? Finding people to work with and layer in some farming. Obviously we know the benefits between hunting and farming. A hunter can just go out and find something and kill it and eat it and, you know, drag it back and say, hey, this is done where a farmer has to plant it, water it, wait and let it, let it nurture, and then hopefully it grows up. And so a good business has both of these strategies in it. And we're going to discuss two different ones, one for hunting and one for farming. So let's start with hunting and how you can implement a strategy for this in your business. So, so the first thing that you can do from a hunting perspective is you could build a list of all of the businesses that could refer you people. So for example, let's say that you are a carpet cleaning company. You could build a list of realtors, you could build a list of restaurants, you could build a list of property management companies. And then you could proactively reach out to those people through calls, emails, that kind of stuff, and offer them either a discount or just continue to add value. And then eventually they're going to refer you business. So one way that we do this is we have a tool that allows you to reach out to customers. For example, like let's say we want to reach out to carpet cleaning companies because we've had success working with them. We can go here and we have a list of carpet cleaning companies, and then again, we can reach out to them and say, hey, you know, we do X, Y and Z, maybe you could work with us. And so we have a list of those people. And so from a hunting perspective, that's a really good way to get in front of your target audience. Maybe you don't know the types of businesses necessarily to work with, or you don't know the names or the decision makers. You can use LinkedIn or even a simple Google search, like for example, carpet cleaning in Washington, for example. You can just go here to more business and then you have all their contact information. So just go through and start reaching out to all these people. You have their phone numbers. Just call them, right? And then ask for their contact email because you want to send them an email. Just start building your list. All right, so the next way is farming. And obviously this is what most people want to get to, which is we want people to just call us because we have such a great reputation. We've laid the foundation and the seeds and, and a lot of times when we partner with companies, it's because they need this layer of digital marketing implemented. We'll also work with their sales team to come up with strategies for this. But most of the time it has to do with farming. And so when we look at farming, we look at where are the people that are going to be searching for a product or service that you offer and how can they reach your business? So where are all these people at? And all these people are going to be on Google. They're going to be asking Google for the best carpet cleaning company near me or the best air duct cleaning company near me. And so what we have to do is lay the foundation from a SEO search engine optimization perspective. We got to plant those seeds, we got to water them, we got to let the sun hit them, we got to do everything that Google wants. And I made videos about this before, but this is everything Google wants. They want you to optimize your Google my business or Google business profile, 36% of your rankings that they want. They want you to get reviews, they want you to do on page SEO, they want you to build backlinks, they want you to do citations, they want you to personalize it. We do all this stuff for our clients because we want, when that person goes looking for them on Google, we want to tell Google everything that we can, all day, every day, every month, every week, every day, that this is the company that that person's looking for. So we're helping them build that audience. So how does this work? Someone goes and looks for air duct cleaning in Manassas, Virginia, in this local service pack. 30% of clicks happen right here. You can see that they refer our business. And so we obviously want them to show up here. And not only do we want them to show up, but we want them to show out. We want them to stand out amongst the rest. And clearly you see they have 2000 Google reviews. The next closest one has 139. Who are they going to pick? This company or this company? Obviously they're going to go to this company first because of the reputation that they have online. And so from a farming perspective, the best thing that you can do as we just looked at, is get Google reviews. Try and optimize your Google My business to the best of your ability. Google's changing and this is changing a lot. They just changed the name from Google My Business to Google Business Profile. But there's a lot of things changing. But the most important thing, get reviews, post pictures, post on your Google My business. Google loves this kind of stuff. And so those are the two strategies that we would recommend when you look at hunting and farming. Hunting create a list, reach out to those people on a monthly basis and add value. So say hey, right now it's a, it's a prime time to do X, Y and z. We're offering $50 off, you know, whatever it is. Add as much value as possible for farming. Do as much as you can from your Google My business perspective, that's going to be the lowest hanging fruit for your business. Obviously we do a lot of other things, but at the core of what we do, those are the two basic low hanging fruit things that we help set up with our clients. If you are looking to grow your local service business, we post content about growing local service businesses. I'll put some links down below that may be helpful and be sure to hit that like and subscribe. I'll see you all in the next video.