We Stopped Google Ads and TRIPLED Revenue in 12 Months

One of our partner companies went from $81,000 per month to $240,000 per month in 12 months after they stopped running Google Ads. In this video, I'm going to break down exactly what we did from a sales and marketing perspective so you can replicate that in your business. One of the newer home service companies that we work with was doing about $80,000 a month and had been stuck there month after month. They were working with typical cookie cutter SEO companies, spending about $2,500 per month for SEO services. They felt like they should be doing more for marketing. And when they reached out to their marketing company, they said, speaking spend more on ads. That's not the best strategy to grow your business if you don't have the data. And that's exactly what we broke down with this company. So let's start with marketing. What we have with this business is a typical remodel type of home service company. People wanted to do a project at their house, so they do some research online. They'd go to the website, reach out to the business, and the business would set up an estimate, go out to the home, and give them an estimate on their project. The problem is this company was doing marketing, but they didn't have a strategy to convert website traffic into leads and then nurture those leads into actual sales. They would get traffic to their website, but they didn't have the right call to actions, and so they're missing out on all the leads that they should be getting. They also had accumulated 11,000 followers on Instagram by sharing before and after content walkthroughs. But they didn't have a way to turn those followers into actual leads in their business. The first thing we had to do was take a look at their visibility. Where's the traffic coming from to their website, and is it good traffic? Is it local traffic that's going to convert into leads? So we set up a keyword tracker with 500 keywords. And the first time we did this, they had 200 keywords in position one through five on Google. So that's not bad. So they were getting decent traffic to their website. What we did from there was audited their entire website to make sure that the service areas that they wanted to target also being reflected in the content that was being created. So what we did was we took their top 10 service areas and we created service area pages on their website dedicated to that specific area that looked like remodeling in this specific city. Whatever the services in that specific city, the outcome was after going through and auditing everything. Building out these service area pages, optimizing their website for local SEO. They ranked for 274 keywords in position 1 through 5. This was the growth of 37% of actual keyword improvement. You can see on this graph. This keyword tracker tracks 500 keywords every single week. So we can see are the rankings going up or down. This takes the blackmagic and Vudu out of SEO and helps show progress. If you're paying for SEO, you should be getting something like this. So who cares about rankings. We want to see actual traffic to the website that converts into leads and we're going to get to conversions in a little bit. But let's take a look at their traffic. You can see here that last year their traffic was 1,335 people from specifically organic search. This year, after working with us, they're at 3716. Almost 3x3 times more people are coming from organic search to their website, which is great because more local traffic from organic search is going to turn into more leads for their business. The other part to SEO is local SEO on your Google business profile. So what we did was we went through and audited their entire Google business profile we went through to make sure that their main category is correct. Their products and services are built out, they have relevant pictures, they're responding to reviews. And on a monthly basis, we went through and audited those same things. Sometimes Google changes out their main category because they do a specific type of remodeling. So we need to make sure that we are categorized in the right place so that the right people are finding the results. You can see them right here. Year over year. They had 12% more people see their business profile. More importantly, they showed up in 118% more searches year over year. So that visibility resulted in 180 website clicks year over year for an increase of 227% and 16 phone calls for an increase of 433%. Of course it's great to get more visibility, but we love to see the action of website visitors and calls because that's going to turn into conversions. The last piece of visibility that we had to dial in was Google Ads. And we actually ended up stopping their Google Ads because they weren't performing. How do we know they weren't performing? Because it's so important that you track your return on ad spend data. If you're running ads, you have to make sure that every single month you go in and you look at all the leads that came from your ads and figure out what happened to those leads. Did you convert them into actual dollars? And what we found out with this business was that they were generate 2 to 3x return on what they were spending. The goal is to get to at least 5x return to 10x return. That's going to be a profitable use of your ad money. What we realized with this company in particular was if we take that same 2 to $3,000 of the spending on Google Ads and hire a videographer and double down on social media content, we could get more traffic to the website that into more leads. And that's exactly what happened. Based off this data. You can see here that 12 months before working with us, they had 543 people to their website from organic social media. After we made the pivot, they went up 10x organic social traffic to their website. All this traffic is not specifically localized traffic, but what we did was we doubled down on social media content and said, hey, let's use that to drive traffic to the website. I want to make a quick note on this. Most traditional digital marketing companies are never going to tell you to cut specific services because then they're going to lose money. This is why it's so important to work with a company that cares about overall growth in the business and not just specific channels of what they're going to get paid for or do. Because this in particular, we took two to $3,000 and said go hire a local videographer, have them come on site and create video content. We knew that that's going to drive more traffic to the website to help convert more leads through our funnel, to give us more opportunities to retarget and overall grow the business, which is exactly what it did. Okay, so getting more website traffic, more keywords ranking is great, but let's take a look at how this actually converted into leads for this business. Prior to working with us, this company had 326 leads that came through over a 12 month period. After we made these adjustments, they had 520 leads come business over 12 months. That was an increase of 60% more leads, which explains more visibility to the website with the right conversion tools is going to turn into more leads. We had to make sure that we dialed in their conversion tools on their website. And we did that with three different things. First, we added a pop up widget to their website. Basically when someone comes to the website, we presented an offer right away. So that way people could turn into a lead immediately. This would be like 10% off services or $500 off a specific project, but something that they would trade their phone number and email address to turn into a lead. The second call to action that we use was a chat widget. The reason the chat widget was so important is because when people go to your website, they might have specific questions. Do you do this service? Do you do it in this area? And they don't want to dig through your site to try to find the answer. Most people are spending 20, 30 seconds on a website, so you want to make that super easy for them by having a chat widget where they can fill out a quick form, turn into a text message. And now you have a lead that you can communicate back and forth with this customer via text. And the third call to action with pretty much every single website misses is on their homepage right below the first scroll. You want to have a form there that says get an estimate. It takes seven seconds or request a quote or get service. We call these a seven second form. On that form, you want your name, phone number, email address, and maybe select a quick service and click submit. That's it. The reason these are so important is because you're telling them, get a quick estimate, it only takes seven seconds. You're reinforcing that. They can get the answer to their problem in seven seconds. The other piece of this was we connected with their CRM. So when someone filled out one of these forms, it went directly into their CRM, which allowed them to start nurturing these leads right away. It's so important to connect these call to actions on your website directly into your CRM so your team can get right onto it. If the forms are not connected, then they have to go over into their emails, find the emails, go back, call the customer. When you dial it all in, it goes right to your CRM and if it sends them a text in an email, okay, so once we got the leads dialed in, now we need to generate more estimates. So before working with us, they had generated 230 estimates. Twelve months after working with us, they're up to 295 estimates for an increase of 30% more estimates. This company in particular knows that there's a problem with their lead to estimate process. So we've built out a nurture sequence for them. I'll probably make another video in the future about how we've impacted this number, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement here which is going to only help them grow in the future. A quick note on this. The business owner at this point realized that they have so many Leads coming in that they need a better process to help them grow. So he was the salesperson and the CSR answering these leads and booking appointments. So what he did was he doubled down. He said, okay, I need to hire a customer service representative to answer my phones, work the leads, and I need to hire a salesperson to go out and run these jobs. This was a pivotal part in the business that helped him go from 80,000 to 240,000 because it freed him up to start leading the company instead of being the bottleneck and the hero on every single job. And a funny thing happened. The salesperson that they hired had worked at a similar company previously and they said, wow, these are the best leads that I've ever worked. This is a testament to building off of brand, building off of social content, building off of organic content, building off of a local reputation and not just Google Ads. Angie HomeAdvisor all these pay per lead platforms where it's just speed to lead and no one knows anything about your business and all they're doing is taking the lowest price. If you build it the right way with a solid foundation, you're going to get quality leads. That's going to turn into estimates and ultimately into sales. Okay, which leads us directly into sales. So before working with us, they closed 101 estimates in a 12 month period. After working with us, they closed 142 estimates in that same 12 month period for an increase of 42%. What this tells me is that they got good leads, they converted those leads into estimates and they fixed that problem with the estimates that I mentioned before. But those estimates were good estimates, but they were able to sell them as well. The visibility section that I mentioned before is a trailing indicator. We're going to get more traffic to the website, we're going to convert more leads and hopefully that turns into sales. But sales is really the true number that's going to tell you that your marketing is actually working. Your estimate count, your total sales close is going to tell you and you work backwards into your leads that this is actually working. And by the way, if you're a home service business owner doing over a million dollars in revenue and these strategies are helping you out, we do free marketing audits to help you grow your business. You can go to flashconsulting.com, set up a meeting with one of our team members to see if we can help you. Worst case, you get free actionable takeaways to help you grow your business. And best case, we work together to help you get unstuck the last piece of a great marketing plan is to retarget your past prospects and customers. In this company. We hit a home run. Prior to working with us, they had never sent out a formal monthly newsletter to any of their customers. So what we did was we took all their prospects and customers from their database, and we came up with a content calendar. So every single month, we had a theme that we're going to be talking about. We started sending out emails. The first email we sent out, we generated $20,000 estimate. And here's the story. 12 months prior, a prospect reached out to them to do a project in their home. They ended up not going with this company because they wanted to go with someone else that was a little less expensive. Now they just got our email newsletter about a separate project, something completely different than what they got an estimate for before. And they immediately replied to that email and said, I wish I would have gone with you because you had a better process and better reviews and reputation. Now with this project, I'm going to go with you. And that turned into $20,000 estimate, all by retargeting their past prospects and customers via email. Email marketing to your past prospects and customers is a gold mine that most companies miss, and they're losing out on tons of revenue. We actually helped an H VAC contractor generate $250,000 in revenue over 12 months just by sending out an email newsletter every single month. I actually documented that entire process of doubling their revenue in 12 months in this video. And if that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.