Phil Risher explains why Yelp frustrates home service businesses: leads come as messages without phone numbers. His fix: spend 3-10% of revenue on marketing, test small amounts across channels, track what works, then double down on winners to unlock Yelp's hidden value.
3–10% of revenue.
I mean, everybody hates Yelp, and here you are talking about how valuable it can be if you do it the right way. How did you come across the right way to do it?
People hate Yelp because they don't give you the phone number for the lead. It's just literally a message. So you could be in there just messaging people back all day, and no one responds, and you're like, well, this is dumb. So I was at that home service business, and they always call you from a Chicago number is the salespeople's number. What they do is they say, hey, yeah, there's a lot of searches in your area that you're not showing up for. You should think about increasing your Yelp budget or spending money on Yelp, because there's a lot of people searching for your service, and they're not finding any. What I said was, okay, well, we have a blended mix. Like, we spend, you know, 3 to 10% of our revenue on marketing. So what that allows us to do is then to deploy different funds. You know, 2000 over here, a thousand over here, 1500 over here. Then we can track what's actually working and double down on those things.
