Video Embed
Video Transcript
There's a lot of advice out there of what you should be doing to market your home service business. The web is inundated with articles that tell you to get a website, do social media, run Google ads and all this other stuff and it's like you really should be doing all these things.
I disagree. Two points off. The reality is that certain marketing efforts are going to help you more at certain stages of your business. So, we're going to be talking about three different stages of business and the marketing that's actually going to help you in that specific stage.
Without further ado, let's dive in. Phase number one is the preparation phase. This is before you start most of your business operations. Now, what you wanna do at this stage is mostly just get things set up.
Starting with your company brand assuming you don't have bucket loads of money to start with, your company brand you want to do for as cheap as you can, but you also don't want to be stupid with it. What would be stupid would be to pick a really generic name like JBB Heating and Cooling that that pretty much no one is ever going to remember. So, I am really going to boil things down here, but basically you want to start off by naming your company something that presents a strong visual in your mind, something that is preferably positive and something that does not give off bad vibes to middle aged moms.
Once you've decided on a company name, you can use Fiverr to hire a graphic designer to make you a logo and then you can use VistaPrint to get yourself some custom shirts. At this stage, you also want to get a CRM and learn how to use it. CRMs are great for tracking all your contacts, doing your scheduling, and you're gonna want to start tracking your contacts right away, with all of the marketing you're doing so that you can remarket to them later and start building up a solid customer base. But But, you don't want to wait until you're in the middle of the rush to learn how to do all that stuff, you want to learn how to do it first.
And so, once you start into your launch phase, it'll be ready to go for you. Another thing you want to do in the preparation phase is get your Google My Business listing established. This is going to help customers find you on Google and it'll give you a place to start collecting positive reviews so you can build up your reputation and make it easier for customers to decide to move forward with you. Again, you want to do this in the prep phase because sometimes it's a little bit of a headache to get set up.
You don't want to wait to do that when you're smack dab in the middle of your busy season. And that, ladies and gentlemen, takes us to the launch phase. Alright, hold on a second. My video editor is going to make me launch.
She did a pretty good job. During the summer demand, it's hard for a lot of HVAC companies to keep up, so those are extra customers that might sign on with you just because you can do the work. At this phase, you want to knock on doors. Because you don't have a ton of money to spend on marketing yet, but you do have a ton of time cause you don't have a huge customer list yet, knocking on doors is probably one of the best ways that you can get customers early on.
You also want to be posting on social media. So it's not too hard to get your Facebook account built up to one thousand, two thousand friends. And if you're posting consistently talking about what your business is doing, giving updates, talking about how to do tune ups and filter changes and things like that, you probably will start to see some work trickle in and that can be a really good free source of leads. Also posting in local communities and things like that.
Once you get some money coming in, you'll have some cash flow to then use pay per lead services. Pay per lead companies are great at the beginning when you don't already have all of your marketing build up because they already have their funnels build up. You can just pay them, they'll plug you into their system and they're already getting all those leads And so, you can start getting leads and making sales very, very quickly. Now, make sure you're adding all those leads to your CRM.
Make sure you are a killer when it comes to the follow-up. And also, try to develop your sales process and get better and better with each appointment that you run. At this stage, you also want to get an inexpensive web site. I'm talking a few hundred dollars or you wanna use Wix or Squarespace to build your own.
And the reason I don't recommend investing too heavily in a website yet at this stage of the business is because at this stage, your website should be more of a portfolio and a sales tool to get people to trust you for the leads you already have, not as a lead generation tool. So you want to have pictures of projects, highlight your best reviews, maybe you can get some video customer testimonials on there, that would be really good. You can have pictures of yourself, maybe pictures of you and your family in the about page so that you can build trust again with the prospects that you already have.
So, at this point your business is growing, you have cash flow coming in, you have your basic website, your basic branding, you have some money left over that you can do something with and really start to invest in your marketing and that's where you move on to the establishment phase. Probably one of the first things you'll want to do in this phase is Google Ads and Meta Ads. And the reason is because both of those things, as you start running them, will generate semi short term results, so you'll probably start to get some sales within the first one to three months. And on top of that, it builds your long term brand, especially the Facebook ads.
The people that don't immediately become a lead and, convert right away, they'll be seeing those ads and there's a good chance they'll go Google you, see your good reviews now that you have those established, see your website now that you have that established. And even if they don't become a lead right away, there's a good chance that after doing their research and maybe a little while later, they'll come back to your website and become a lead and potentially become a customer. Next, you want to invest in a premium brand, I mean really invest. So, you're going to have to redesign your logo, you might even want to change your company name potentially at this stage and for this I would recommend a company called KickCharge Creative. They do a really good job at this stuff And this is something that is almost guaranteed to work.
If you're establishing a company brand that's resonating with families, resonating with moms especially, and, it's something that is memorable, something that creates that strong visual and and looks premium. It will help with a lot of things. Firstly, it just makes your company more memorable, so all your marketing is less expensive, and then it also allows you to charge higher prices so you can make your company even more profitable. Now we get to SEO and the reason I'm recommending SEO as a later stage thing is because it takes a lot of money to invest in a really good company to do it to, get the results that you're gonna wanna see because it's very competitive, there's a lot of great companies out there doing it and there's only so many spaces up on that first page of Google so you want to make sure it's done properly.
And it's something that you also have to give time so you're going to have to probably shell out a lot of money upfront and wait a while to get the results. Now, once you start getting those leads, those are very premium leads, but again, it's just something that takes some time and that's why you kinda wanna wait to that later stage where you already have a lot of good cash flow coming in. Also, the SEO company that you sign up with to do your SEO will probably recommend a new website and you're probably going to want to take them up on that because the site you got for really, really cheap may not be the best structurally for good long term SEO so you probably will want to invest on a new website as you kick off the SEO campaigns.
Thanks so much for watching. I hope this helped you plan your marketing strategy a little bit better and helped you kind of understand where the different marketing strategies actually fit. If you got value from this video, please like, comment, subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one.