The best marketing (Besides Google) Q&A

All right, in this video, we're doing our Ask Flash segment where we pull a list of five questions that people have asked whether it's marketing. In this video, we're going to talk about voice search. We're going to talk about what to do when you're just starting out. We're going to talk about how to scale your business. We're going to talk about retargeting. So we got a lot of good stuff, a lot of good questions, and I'm going to go through and share strategies that we've implemented based off of your questions. So if you have questions about marketing, about growing a local service business, drop a comment down below and we'll use it on our next segment when it comes to Ask Flash. Real quick, my name is Toby. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We partner with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. On this channel, we share strategies to help you grow. So if you like stuff like this, hit, like hit subscribe and let's get right into the content. All right, so the first question we have is from Bob. Bob says, I'm looking to re engage clients. Let's say you have 689 clients that you haven't completed work for in over a year. What have you done to get these clients re engaged? So in the funnel that we operate on, we typically look at three different sections. We look at visibility, which is new customers, converting the customers into sale and then retargeting. Retargeting is a big focus, especially if you do a service like H vac, carpet cleaning, something that has pretty good repetitive services that you can do. And so how would we recommend re engaging clients? The first thing is you got to be doing some type of a monthly newsletter or whether that's a newsletter about things that are going on in your local community. It can also be case studies, reviews, social media content that you've been sharing, just everything consolidated into one place. Why? Just because you post on social media doesn't mean that all your people are going to see it. If they've done work with you in the past or if they're a past prospect or they've come into your database, you have their contact information so you need to reach out to them on a monthly basis. Also, you just stay top of mind. So that's the first thing to re engage clients. The second thing you can do is inside of those newsletters, you can do special offers. So if it's spring, summer, fall, winter, whatever you're going to offer you add some special offers into those newsletters. You can also do special offers that are just one time email offers that are outside of your newsletter. And this is a great way. You can do this in text message, you can do this in email, you can do voicemail drops, you can call them, you can do postcards, which are not the most effective way to re engage clients. They do work, but it's also kind of expensive. But those are some strategies to help re engage clients. If I had a low budget and I was gonna do this, I would set up like a mailchimp account or some type of email marketing in my CRM and I would just set up a simple newsletter template and I would use that every single month and I would put a special offer in there to try and reengage clients and try to get some referrals in. So that's what I would do there. All right, let's see what is our next question Here we have. Hi, we're a small cleaning company looking to grow our clientele. I'm not marketing savvy at all. Any suggestion would greatly appreciate. So let's say you're a small company, you're just starting out, what should you do? I definitely recommend joining some type of networking group and BNI is one that we're a part of, Business Network International. The reason it's so good is because everyone in that room that you meet with on a weekly basis is a sales team for you out in the marketplace. So if you do own a small cleaning company, then let's say that there's a carpet cleaning company in there, a painter in there, a remodeler in there. If you build relationships with them, they can refer you business after their service. You can go in and clean the home and, and then you can get them on some type of monthly or quarterly cleaning and you can start to build your snowball of business like that. So if you're not marketing savvy and you don't know technology and stuff, that's a really good way to just get deals going quickly. Now once you get into marketing savvy, obviously like Google business profile, setting up a Yelp account, Google business is the low hanging fruit. Get reviews on all your jobs, do free cleanings or discounted cleanings to get reviews, that kind of stuff. And then like we mentioned before, retargeting, especially with clean, this is, you can, you can retarget people weekly, monthly, every holiday. This should be a special, that kind of stuff, it's really big about just building your snowball of customers inside of that. That sphere. All right, next question. Has anyone experienced your company's Google's reviews fluctuating by 30 to 40 reviews at a time or going from 940 to high 800 several times now back to low 900. So this is the big thing that we're seeing a lot of right now where on Google they're going through and removing fake reviews that they deem fake. And they're also putting lag times on new reviews coming in. And so if you're experiencing reviews and you see that reviews have gone or come back, there is a way inside of your Google business profile to go in and you can actually have a Google person evaluate your account to see if they may have done something that was not correct. But also if you see these big ranges of 30 to 40 reviews, that could probably be what it is, is that they're really just trying to go through and clean up. The way this is like, let's say that there's a husband and wife and they're on the same IP address or in the same household or something like that, and they both leave you a review. That could be why. Or if there is someone that probably is in like California and you're in New York and all their stuff is in California and they left you review in New York, they're looking at that, saying, okay, they've never left a review in New York. So have they been to New York before? And they might be removing it. So there's a bunch of things, there's a, there's a Federal Trades Commission law that's actually coming out that's going through like fake reviews, paying for reviews, suppressing negative reviews. So there's a lot of changes going on when it comes to reviews. And so that's definitely something to monitor, but that's probably what it is. All right, and let's get to the last question. What has been your best marketing strategy besides Google to drive and work. I feel like the days of drive time radio and live news reads just don't hit like they used to. All right, Tyler. Yeah, you're right, man. No, don't. Radio is good, but I mean if you're like doing some heavy branding stuff. So besides Google, what I would say is business to business relationships. And this will be like if you do carpet cleaning, you know, reaching out to other companies that need the service. So let's say carpet cleaning, let's say that you reach out to people that do new carpet installation, they don't do the carpet cleaning side. Then you can refer them business back and forth, but after every single carpet installation, maybe they give them a half off of the cleaning because they need to get it to maintain the manufacturer warranty. And so then you have a steady flow of referral leads coming in from people that just had their carpet installed that are now getting referred into you. The reason that this is so good is because with like running ads on Google, running ads on Yelp, you know, all that stuff is good that we help with that kind of stuff. But what we found is that that's very transactional marketing. And when you can build a brand and a reputation in the marketplace that people are referring you business in, it's much easier to scale your business opposed to just fighting one on one transaction based. We made videos about some B2B strategies before, but you know, you can make a list of contractors or whatever and then you can reach out to them and try to set up partnerships. We obviously help our clients do this because it's one of the big things that helps them scale. So if you're interested, you know, in learning more about that, you can set up a strategy session with us. But aside from Google, that's the best one. If you're looking for other platforms to use, we've seen pretty good, like Nextdoor has been good for really local stuff. Facebook is okay. It's just really hard to run Facebook ads. A lot of people are just pricing you out or their price shoppers, a lot of stuff. Yelp is decent. I know people go back and forth on Yelp, Angie. It's, you know, hit or miss. They shop out your stuff. So it's really hard to find those transaction. One thumbtack is a good one that some people have had good success with. But really what we found is from like an SEO search engine optimization perspective, just about building your brand, building your reputation and landing that snowball. Obviously Google local service ads. Google search ads work good too. Cool. Well, I hope that this was a good video. If you like stuff like this, be sure to drop a comment below and a like and let me know your thoughts if you have a question. You know, obviously comment down below. But we're going to start to do some more Q&As because I think that it, it really just helps take questions that people are asking and then put a mindset to it that can hopefully answer some of the questions that you might have. Cool. Hit like and subscribe. We'll see you in the next video.