I Doubled a $2.7M Business and Learned This Game Changing Marketing Truth

I took a $2.7 million home service business and doubled it in three years. And it wasn't luck. I discovered one game changing marketing truth that most agencies don't want you to know. And I'm going to show you step by step exactly what you need to do to replicate the growth in your business. Before starting my company, helping home service businesses grow using digital marketing, I was director of business development at the largest air duct cleaning company in the country. They were doing $2.7 million, which is pretty big for duct cleaning companies, and ultimately doubled to $5.4 million. And there was a unique way that we helped them grow. But when I started, they were basically doing SEO, paid ads, Angie, Google Ads, Facebook ads, Yelp, trying a bunch of different things. The leads were inconsistent at best or just cheap leads. And to be honest, the lead management process was non existent. They would get leads that came in, but they had no game plan for actually working those leads. The marketing agencies that we were working with would just push the cookie cutter, Same old thing, same spend more on ads, do more SEO. And when I would ask them, well, who are these leads that you got us from Google Ads? What is our return on ad spend from these different channels? How do we know that if we spend more money, we're going to get more leads that are going to be actual customers and actually generate revenue? And every single time they would just push back on me and say, well, that's something that you need to figure out. You need to use your CRM, you need to connect the dots and tell us what's working and what's not. And I was like, you're my digital marketing company. You should be coming to me with, proactively with things that are working and not working. If you're a home service business owner, you probably felt the exact same way. You spend thousands of dollars on marketing, you don't know if it's actually working. Then you get on a call and they say, well, how's business? And you're like, I don't know, you should tell me because you have all my data. And they're like, no, you have your data and there's nothing that's working together to help you grow. So I knew within a couple of months we needed to do something differently. And that's when I really started to dive in on the customer journey. From Google search to five star review, I analyzed over a thousand customer calls to figure out, well, what exactly were the good ones and what exactly were we missing to help connect the dots to grow our business. And that's when things started to take off. Business owners need to stop chasing leads and start building a customer journey in their business that looks like this. There's three pillars that we uncovered. The first one is visibility. Visibility is new customers coming into your funnel. That's going to be organic search online. Whether that's off site SEO, on site SEO ads, whether that's Google Ads, Yelp ads, Angie ads, Google local service ads, any type, thumbtack ads, whatever ads that you're running, social media content, and then ads on top of that, getting referrals, direct mail, prospect calls, and B2B partnerships. So inside of new customers, when we talk about organic search online, we're looking at off site SEO and on site SEO. So we want to make sure that when you're paying for SEO, it's not all black magic and voodoo, that you're actually tracking your rankings and it's correlating to increased website traffic. Because if you get more people to your website, you're going to get more leads from your website. The other thing is ads. If you're paying for someone to run ads for you, they need to be going to a landing page. On that landing page, you need to have a custom tracking number tracking form. So that way you can correlate, hey, we got this many leads and that's tied directly back to these Google Ads. And this is how much revenue we generated every single month. You should be getting a return on ad spend report that's helping you when it comes to new customers. We had an electrician that we worked with that was running ads, but they had no idea of the data. So they were spending $4,000 a month on ads. We came in, we tweaked their campaigns. The next month they generated $53,000 from the $4,000 spent in actual revenue closed. On top of that, they generated $127,000 in total proposals. So they took $4,000 and made $127,000. Then they asked us, well, what should we be doing? Well, now we have the data to make decisions. Let's just do more of that. Inside of social media content, this, the best type of content is video content that's recorded on site with your technician or team talking about customer issues and questions. If you want a good playbook for this, whatever content's working organically, take that content and then turn it into your ads. That's going to be the content that people are going to actually watch and that can turn into real leads. Because now you have money. The other Big one when it comes to new customers is B2B partnerships. This is creating affiliate partners or other complementary business partners that are going to refer you business. A lot of times companies say that they have some plan like this, but they don't have a designated game plan to get referrals coming into their business. And that's why they need a process when it comes to new customers for this. When it comes to visibility, most agencies, marketing people are going to say, you know, do SEO run ads? The big piece that's missing here is using the data to make decisions when it comes to getting new customers. Now the next piece here is conversions. Just because you have all this visibility doesn't mean that you're going to be able to convert all those people into leads. And that's where this conversion funnel comes in place. Someone goes to your website, they need to turn into a lead the next one. This is a huge opportunity for most businesses. They don't have a lead problem, they have a lead management problem. Leads come into the business and they call them once. 41% of leads never even get called. 66% of them get called one time, and that's a big problem. Leads come in and then there's no process to manage your leads. They just sit there and then you move on to the next one. Same thing with estimates. A lot of times you send out estimates and it's on you, the business owner, or your salesperson or customer service rep to follow up on these estimates. And nine times outta 10, you get really busy, something slipped through the cracks and then you're like, oh, yeah, I need to follow up with this person. You need to have an estimate nurture sequence with texts, emails, voicemail drops, calls. That way you're closing more deals. We had a company that we helped increase their close rate by 12% just by implementing this estimate nurture sequence into a sale. So you need to have chat widgets, estimate calculators, online scheduling, a bunch of different tools to convert your website traffic at 10% into leads. Once they turn into a lead, you have to have a lead management plan in place because now not every single person is going to be ready to sign up. Get an estimate, schedule an appointment. You have to have a lead nurture sequence that happens to get them to schedule an appointment or to get them to an estimate. So once they come to your conversion funnel, now it's retargeting. Retargeting is taking everyone, all the prospects that didn't convert and the customers that came through your funnel and inviting them to Come back into your funnel again. That's going to be sending them opportunities to refer your business, Setting up a monthly newsletter to go out to them, to cross sell different services to keep them aware of what you're currently doing. Text marketing, usually biannual, to stay top of mind and bring people back into your funnel. We had a company that we work with, they weren't emailing or texting their customers ever. So we set up a monthly email newsletter to go out to their customers. And in the first year, 12 months, they generated $263,000 in revenue just by sending out 12 email newsletters every single month. So leads come in. We need a nurture sequence, estimates. We need to have an estimate nurture sequence to get them to a sale. And this is how in this big blue ocean over here, this is how we get all the data that funnels back over here. It's not just about, oh, we got this many conversions from Google Ads or this many website visitors. It's all about how many leads do we get and how much revenue do we actually generate to pull people back over here. So this customer journey at the Duckling company wasn't a fluke. The business owner was actually like, hey Phil, you're so good at this, you need to go out and help other home service businesses. So we implemented this customer journey in an H Vac contractor. They went from 3 million to 6 million to 8 million, all within 36 months. Then another H Vac contractor, we went from 1.5 to 3 million in 12 months. And since then, I've helped dozens of home service businesses implement this customer journey in their business in a done for you system. That way they can predictably grow their business, use data to create a flywheel of growth inside of their company. If you feel like you're spinning your wheels, wasting money on marketing, that doesn't work. And even worse, you don't have the data to make decisions and you just feel like you're gambling every single time you're talking to your marketing company. You need to consider setting up a customer journey for your business. Visibility, conversions, retargeting, and make sure that every single part is optimized to help you grow your business. If you want help with that, you can go to flash consulting.com and click discuss your business. You can also check out how we help this company double from 1.5 to 3 million. I broke everything down in this video right here, and if that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.