Building your marketing plan the right way.
Marketing is an extremely important yet underrated aspect of business - if you could invest $20,000 into marketing and make back $60,000 wouldn’t you be the king of the world. You would - and marketing, if done right, can be the difference between an extremely successful business or a failure.
When it comes to marketing for service companies - most people do it wrong. A lot of marketing agencies do a great job at taking your money but that’s about it and it’s because they understand the intricacies of service companies.
It’s a lot easier to sell products than it is home services because we need time to build up that trust. With marketing for a home service business you need to balance long term marketing with short term which is difficult to do because the results of the long term don’t come as fast or are as easy to track.
When building a marketing plan - you need to start with a foundation of what makes your brand unique. What makes you different? If you’re in a highly competitive market this is even more important but if you’re the only plumber in town then it doesn’t matter.
When making a long term plan and getting your foundation right - ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s your story and purpose for doing what you’re doing?
- What are your company's values / how do you do things?
- How do you want to stand out in the marketplace?
- How will you get attention compared to your competitors?
- How do you want customers to describe your company?
- What is the ONE thing you’d like to be known for?
Once you get the above answered then it’s about using that for direct customer acquisition including:
- A high converting website with a video
- Ranking high on Google with lots of reviews
- Google Ads
- Local Service Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Direct Advertising (Flyers etc)
- Partnerships
- Door to Door
Combined with the secondary channels:
- Radio Ads
- YouTube Ads
- Spotify Ads
- Lawn Signs
- Van designs
A really important thing to keep in mind is that the above channels won’t be effective unless you run a consistent & long term marketing strategy. If your ads are awful and don’t stand out - it doesn’t matter how much you spend on them they won’t work. It has to be unique and consistent with your brand and people have to care about how you present that brand.
Calculating Investment ROI
At the end of the day, no matter what you decide on at the end of the day all that matters is that you’re getting qualified leads at a price point that makes sense. If you had an unlimited marketing budget then you could have the worst ads and it won’t matter but most of us are in the business of making money. Therefore we need to pay attention to our customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value of each customer (LTV) and the payback period. The LTV is how much revenue or profit we generate from each customer over however long they will use our services and the payback period is how long until we make our CAC back.
Ideally, you want your CAC to be ⅓ of your LTV (in profit) otherwise your marketing is too expensive. If you’re spending $100 to acquire a customer, and your profit is $100 then you’re effectively losing money to serve that customer.
The CAC will be a combination of how much you pay for the lead and the conversion rate to a job so it’s really important to not only pay the right amount for the lead but making sure your staff is trained and converting at a high clip. The LTV and payback period will depend on your pricing and the technician's ability to convert the customer to a higher paying job and keep them coming back.
When breaking down the cost of acquiring each customer you need to break it down to a per channel basis. For example if you’re spending money on Google Ads you will need to figure out how effective Google Ads is in isolation to the rest of your channels.
This is where phone number tracking is super important and you use a service like CallRail to give each channel their own number so you know exactly where that call came from. While it’s not an exact science and your other marketing efforts may influence a role in this - it gives you a starting point and most importantly, trend.
The reason why trend is important is because it’s tough to track “branding” marketing expenses like radio, lawn signs, vans and the rest. What they do is slowly influence the market over time and get in your potential customer’s subconscious mind so when they’re ready for your service and they google for it - your name pops out thus reducing your cost per click and even increases your search engine rankings.
This is just a super brief overview of what it takes to build a solid marketing plan and there is so much more that you could write a book on it (and they do). However, with how fast things move you need to stay on top of what’s moving before everyone else does.
If you’re looking for help with your marketing plan then book a call with us by scheduling a time below. A few helpful hints or guidance can make a massive difference in the future growth of your business.
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