Q: How to Decrease My Marketing Budget?! #marketingstrategy #marketingbudget #hvacmarketing

All right, we got a good video for you today. We're going to be going through, if you're just starting out, some 10 ideas on how you can get started. We're also going to go through some other lead channels that are not Angie or Google and what you should do to reduce your marketing budget and some strategies for that. And also we're going to go through some key performance indicators, three of them specifically for performance marketing. If you like Content about growing local service businesses. On this channel, we share free content about growing your service business. So be sure to hit like and subscribe so that you stay up to date with the most recent content. Get right into this. We have those questions here. So the first question that we have is from Luis. If you were starting over from scratch in H Vac with no money and no acquisitions, what are the first 10 steps that you would take? Now, right now in the market, I'm sure that people are seeing this. There's a lot of private equity people buying companies, people trying to get into home services because it is very lucrative. And that's been shown over the past couple years. So here's some of the strategies that I would do if I was just starting an H Vac company. Now, I obviously was the director of business development. I talked about this before at a local air duct cleaning company that was a multi seven figure business and we were able to scale that and have a successful exit. And so I know a thing or two about local service businesses literally working inside of one. So if I was just starting an H Vac company or really any service business, whether it's carpet cleaning, electrical restoration, movers, whatever, some of the first things I would do is first I would join a local networking group like bni, which is something that we're a part of. And even the people on our team, we sign them up because it's a lot of local service businesses. But the beauty of a local networking group is that they are your salespeople. So in BNI specifically, you meet once a week, you go there, you build a relationship, and then these are your salespeople. So there might be a realtor in there, there might be a title attorney, there might be an electrician, a painter, a mover. And all these people are inside of people's homes. They're talking with people that are buying homes or selling homes and they'll need a service. And so they can easily recommend you in. If you do H Vac, for example, and say like, hey, do you have someone that's going to be doing Your H VAC service, a bi annual basis. No. Okay, you gotta talk with Luis or whoever. So that's probably the first thing I would do because it's very low expense, you know, maybe a couple hundred bucks and you can turn all these people into salespeople for you, which is great. Another thing I definitely recommend, you know, set up your Google business profile, start getting reviews on there in H vac. Depending on your market, it can be very competitive. But just having a Google business profile is good because people may recommend you and then they say, oh, Luis, like what was this company name again? They go on Google and they try to search you and obviously you want them to find you. You want them to read your reviews and say, oh yeah, this is the guy. Oh wow, he has great reviews. Yeah, let me definitely give him a call. It's just another cue in there. So I would definitely do that. As far as website, you know, make a basic website. You don't have anything too crazy when you're just starting out. Just something that's simple, has a couple contact forms, maybe you set up some online scheduling. I would also recommend getting some type of a CRM, client relationship manager. Whether that's like housecall pro, jobber, service titan, service monster, you know, there's a bunch of them out there. Service Fusion, Workiz, whatever CRM that you choose, you know, IBA 50, 100 bucks a month when you're just starting out. But the beauty of it is that you keep track of all your stuff. Also you can keep track of all your prospects and customers so that you can retarget them for marketing. So that's just three ideas right there. But I would definitely recommend watching some of our other videos if you're curious about other freeways. We have a bunch of content about that. All right, let's get right into the next question. Curious what others are doing for lead generation besides Google leads? Angie Home Advisor I would like to reduce my marketing budget but not take a hit to my call volume. This is a common thing that people are always asking, which is my marketing budget's really high, but it's not generating the same level of leads. And a lot of times what we find is that people are very focused on transactional marketing, which is you pay $10,000 and you get a thousand leads or whatever. And not that this is bad, but there's also a side of marketing that has to do with your brand marketing and branding. And obviously it takes a lot longer to build a solid brand and reputation in the market. And so you have to be focusing on both. You have to get the transaction, but you don't want to burn your bridges. You want to build the relationships while you're also building your brand. So that way all roads lead back to your company and everyone is referring you in and it's easy to get referrals. And so you want to make sure that your culture and your communication is very tight. You don't want to burn any bridges or opportunities regardless of the services you offer. Even moving companies, just because they might move only once in 30 years doesn't mean that they're not going to have an opportunity to refer you or tell others about their great experience. And so you got to make sure that you're doing an excellent job. The easiest marketing, we always say, is a great product or service because it doesn't really take much to market it because you do such a great job and referrals are going to come in. But to give you some other tangible action items as far as other lead generation sources besides Google leads and Angie, if you want to reduce your marketing budget where you don't want to spend any money, a great way for this is to build a B2B partnership. We actually just made a video about how to create a B2B marketing referral plan. But basically what you want to do is contact other companies that are referral partners with you. So a perfect example of this is like if you are an electrician, then maybe there's like a painter or someone inside of another home that they can refer you in and vice versa. Like if you're an electrician and you patch up walls, then maybe there's a painter that you can bring in and you can refer them and they can refer you vice versa. And the beauty of this is that it doesn't really cost you any money up front, but maybe you give them like, hey, if you send me a deal, I'll give you X amount or X amount of dollars for that lead. And so this is a really great opportunity. A lot of low hanging fruit here that most people don't tap into, which is building these referral connections with people so that way they can refer you in and then you give them an incentive to refer you. So that will probably be the easiest way, especially if you're trying to reduce your marketing budget, is to start building these referral networks. And one other one is to take all of your past prospects and customers and retarget them because they're already in your database. Send them an email, it's basically free. Send out an Email to your database and try to get them to come back into your funnel. And so this is a really nice way. And you don't have to pay for any more leads because you already have a ton of leads that are sitting there that just need to be primed again. So that's really good. And then the last question, this was one that came up in a prospect meeting, which was the key numbers that you want to track for performance marketing. And what is performance marketing? A lot of marketing out there is like frou frou. You know, you got this many impressions. Oh, this is nice. You got this many likes, that kind of stuff. Performance marketing is when you put in a marketing plan that actually produces revenue and actually produces general actual leads. And it's not just like, oh, you got this many impressions or this much reach, it's actually generating a return on investment is performance marketing. And that's what we do. And so the three things that we track is how many leads did this generate, how many jobs did it book, and then how much revenue came from those jobs. So a perfect how this would look in an actual example is let's say you ran Yelp ads and you spent a thousand dollars. How many leads did you get from that thousand dollars? Let's say you got 30 leads. Okay, you spent a thousand dollars, you got 30 leads. So then from there, how many of those sur leads actually booked into jobs? Maybe it's 15. So you book 50% of those into jobs. Not too. Not bad. Depending on your business. Then of those 15, how much revenue did you generate? Let's say it was 500 bucks. And 500 times 15 is like 5,000 something. $7,500. So you spend $1,000 and then you generate $7,500, which is a 7x return, which would be good. 5x is good. 10x is amazing. And that's kind of the realm that you're shooting in is around there for any advertising spend. So those are the three numbers, Leads, jobs booked, and then revenue, and then your ultimate return on ad spend, return on investment based off of what you spent. So if you're running ads or you're looking at ads, a lot of times, it's hard to see one thing that we recommend back to. The first thing about getting a CRM is whoever's answering the phones. Every single call or job that's booked needs to have a lead source attached to it. So if it came from Google or Yelp or Facebook or whatever, it needs to have an attribution to it. Because when you run your reports at the end of the month or however often you run them you're going to be able to see like a campaign summary report which is okay, Facebook generated this many jobs for us, this many leads, this many jobs, this much revenue and if I'm only spending $0 on Facebook maybe I need to increase my budget or if I'm only spending $1,000 I need to increase my budget or vice versa I need to decrease my budget and shift things other places. Back to the first to the question that just came up which is how do I decrease my marketing budget? Also look at what's working and what's not working and cut the stuff that's not working. Cool. So if you like content like this be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you're interested in talking about your business I'll put a link down below. If not we'll see in the next video. Have a great day.