The Home Service Expert Podcast - John Jantsch - Turn Your Business Into A Marketing Machine

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

John has been hailed as the “Peter Drucker of Small Business Marketing tactics.” He’s been a marketing consultant to small business owners for thirty years, a renowned speaker, and author of several marketing and business books, including Duct Tape Marketing. In this episode, we talked about small business marketing strategies, productivity, getting more referrals for your business...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey guys, Tommy Mello back with the home service expert. I got John Jantz here. He's a marketing

expert. And John, I'm really excited to have you on today. I know you're in Kansas right now, and the weather is probably pretty chilly there. Am I right? Yeah, that's right. We're in midwinter. It's February, but the sun's shining, so it's a great day. Well, listen, I like to get the listeners to know who they're talking to. If you could just tell us a little bit about what you've done over the last couple decades, a little bit about yourself, about your company and about your marketing style. That would be amazing. You bet. So I started my own marketing consulting firm coming up on 30 years now.

And I went out like a lot of people who started business. I went out and found whatever work I could get somebody to say they'd pay me for, but I really gravitated towards small business owners. I love working with small businesses. And in many cases, of course, you know, they, they really have trouble buying marketing services. Everybody's selling a piece of the puzzle. And so I created a very systematic approach where I could walk in

and say, you know, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what you're going to do. Here are the results we hope we can get. And by the way, here's what it costs. And I found that, you know, in a lot of ways, I did that for myself, But I found that immediately, small business owners, that idea resonated, somebody was going to come in and install a marketing system, as opposed to just coming in and giving them the idea of the week. So my business took off. And I actually started, it was really about the time when people started educating and selling products and buying services online. And so I documented started documenting my system that I call duct tape marketing, turn that into a book called duct tape marketing. I've now written

five books and we have thousands of small business clients around the globe that have installed the duct tape marketing system. And I have a network now of independent marketing consultants also around the globe that use our methodology and work with businesses of all sides. I would say you asked about a little bit about our approach. I think the thing that sadly that has made us really stand out is we're one of the few marketing consulting type of folks that talk strategy first. And the hallmark of Duct Tape Marketing is that we create a strategy before we ever start talking about tactics. And so many people, small business owners included, want to jump into the idea of the week, the tactic of the week. And, you know, we're firm believers that if you get your ideal client nailed down, you really don't have to spend as much time focusing on this new tactic

or that new tactic or chasing this new idea. You can build a solid foundation on that strategy. So I think what I call that, and correct me if I'm wrong, is basically your unique selling proposition. Is that basically what you try to identify right away? Yeah, that's right. I mean, we call it a core message. That USP term has been around in marketing circles.

I would say probably a different take that we put on it is a lot of people try to come up with, here's our thing that we do different. And we always start with, what problem do you actually solve? Because nobody really wants to buy our products or services or what we sell. They want the problem solved. And so if we can focus on the biggest problems our clients have and communicate that we understand that problem, to me, that is how you make the competition irrelevant. I love it. So tell me a little bit about duct tape. Where did you come up with that concept? Well, so the idea was I wanted to, you know, as I said, I was kind of turning marketing service into a product almost. I mean,

coming in saying, here's the price, here's what you get. So I needed to give it kind of a brand name. And I really can't tell you what the idea was. I'd like to tell you, I did all this research and, you know, came upon this idea, but it just felt right to me. I'd owned my own small business at that point for about 10 years. And it just kind of felt like, you know, that's what people go through. Simple, effective, affordable doesn't always have to be pretty. It just has to work. And so it was really just a metaphor for that kind of reality. And, you know, it doesn't hurt that there's a strange affection for duct tape, at least in North America, that I tapped into as well. Got it. So there wasn't any strange, crazy story. It's just simple out there.

Yeah, it just felt like the right metaphor. And I will tell you over the years that, you know, that's been confirmed. I mean, people will hear me speak and they'll come up afterwards and say, you know, I totally get it. Duct tape marketing is a great name, you know, for a practical approach to small business marketing. I love it. I love it. So the next thing I talk a lot about is, you know, me like many people in the home service industry, we start out, we're working all these hours and we replace productivity with activity. I mean, literally, we're working so hard in our business and never working on the business. I mean, I've sacrificed relationships. I've struggled with sleep at times.

Tell me a little bit about the hurdles you've had to overcome in your business and how you got over them. Well, it's a hard question because I don't think you sit back and think, okay, I got over that hurdle. You know, you work at where you have challenges and, you know, hopefully you look around occasionally and say, wow, I've actually come a long way. But there's no question. I mean, like most people, I started, I was doing everything. You know, some people call it ADD, but I'm really curious about, you know, how new things work and new technologies. And so it's really easy to get me diverted into looking at the next new thing. And you could do that for a while. But when a business starts to grow and you start, there's more balls than you can keep in the air, then you have to start prioritizing. And you have to start figuring out how to say no. You have to start figuring out the things you shouldn't do, can't do, aren't good at doing, and start delegating that. In fact, I work with a lot of startup consulting firms now that we train. And a lot of times when they'll get one or two clients and they're

thinking, this is great. I'm starting to make some money. I can do all this. And I immediately start saying, you've got to figure out now how to get this work done by somebody else. Because you're going to get to a point with three or four or five more clients, and you won't be able to delegate because it's, you know, there's a lot of people learn, it's actually harder in the beginning to delegate properly than it is to do all the work yourself. And so you want to do that before you get overwhelmed. And even in my organization today, we have a team and just like you do that are rarely capable to handle a lot of the things that we need to have handled., we have a team, just like you do, that are really capable, handle a lot of the things that we need to have handled.

But we, once a quarter, reassess our priorities, and we choose as a team three or four things that we're going to focus on. And that may mean saying no or saying later to some other things we want to do, because we know that these are the right things to do, and we get everybody focused on them. I think that's so important for business owners. I talk about that all the time is really identifying what needs to be done. And we start with a three-year, a five-year plan, narrow that down to a one-year plan, narrow that down to quarter, month, week, and then day by day what you need to really get results on. And I think that word results and accountability are very scary to most business owners, but it really needs to be reminded to them at all times.

You know? Well, and I think the other thing, of course, people find out is the day worth of activity will fill itself up. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to choose the right things to fill it up. Because if you aren't intentionally choosing those right things,

you'll get to the end of the day and go, don't know what i did today but i sure was busy exactly and i find that most businesses they don't really understand that they don't have a game plan they don't have a organizational chart they don't have right uh organization within like you go in and there's post-it notes and stuff everywhere. I met a consultant one time and he goes, Tommy, it's very simple. You file it, you scan it, or you throw it out. There should be no papers. And that's something that we really worked hard to do it at my business.

And what is your philosophy on that as far as staying organized to get more productivity out of the day? Well, you know, there are lots of systems. I mean, a couple of things that we do intentionally, and we've picked these up from, I didn't claim to invent a lot of these, you know, just like you were talking about, what was the book, David, gosh, what's his name? Getting Things Done. Yeah.

That, yeah, approach of the folders and everything. There's lots of systems out there. The biggest thing I think it starts with, though, is identifying those priorities, you know, and what is your highest payoff work. If you're the head of the organization, you better be focused on that high payoff work. And what we do in my organization is I actually take two days a week that we call focus days. And that's all I do. I have no appointments, no meetings, no client things. It's just I'm going to work on our high priorities for those two days a week. And I think you really have to get yourself to the point where even if it's two hours on a Friday, you have to carve that time out because you're going to need, you know, especially sometimes strategic work.

You need a big chunk of time in many cases. And so, you know, managing your daily calendar and your daily to-dos is really where that starts, but it's all driven, your decision-making is all driven by your priorities for the quarter. I like that approach. You know, we as small business owners, especially in the home service niche, we really, I think delegating is difficult. We think we've got to do the job or it won't get done right a lot of the time. Marketing is the number one thing I think a company struggles with, especially because right now you've got Google Guarantee, you've got Google Pay-Per-Click, you've got Bing, you've got Money Mailer, Valpex, Rural Gold, you and your home. All these things, there's geofencing, there's programmatic targeting,

there's so many things coming to date. There's Yelp, Kudzu, all kinds. You know, where do I get started if I'm a business owner listening today and I own a home service industry? Well, I think the biggest thing you have to do, and this is whether you work with a consultant, and in a lot of cases, working with a consultant is the right thing. I mean, you know how to do what your business does, whether it's remodeling or roofing, you know how to do what your business does, whether it's remodeling or roofing. You know how to do that. In many cases, you grew up doing the actual work yourself. Even if you're a 50-person firm now, you know how to do that work.

And so, you know, you're an expert in that work. You're not necessarily an expert in or probably shouldn't try to be an expert in SEO and pay-per-click. But you do need to understand enough about it so that you can be an informed buyer. And that's where I see a lot of people get burned because there are so many people selling a piece of the puzzle. Your phone probably rings three, four times a day with somebody wanting to sell you some online tactic or tool. And it can be really confusing to sort it out. It's a very evolving space. And so if you can find a consultant that you or an agency that you trust, and I will tell you the way to find out if there's somebody you can trust, is they should be asking you a lot of

questions about your business, about what's profitable, about your ideal client. They should be talking to your clients first so that they can actually create a plan that's based in a strategy that allows you to stand out, allows you to take advantage of your unique point of difference. And if they come in just talking about tactics, you should probably be a little concerned. So go out there, talk to people in groups, talk to people if you belong to associations. You know, somebody who can be trusted in your industry will rise to the top. And again, from a consulting standpoint, you want somebody who's going to work strategy first and who's also going to teach you. That's certainly an area that

we focus on. We're not trying to teach our clients all the ins and outs of SEO, but we are teaching them why something's important and why we're doing something rather than just doing it for them. Okay. So I think that's great advice that people out there listening is really make sure that the people are asking you. One of the questions I always ask when I'm consulting someone is what's your best jobs? What's the top 20%? It's back to that 80-20 rule. And if I could get you more of this, what would that do for your business?

What would that do for your life? And I think that's exactly a great piece of advice that the people out there should be listening to. So what's a big mistake that a lot of people do when they get into business on the marketing end? And you could talk, if you could break it into offline and online. Oh, sure. So I think a couple, probably the biggest mistake I see, and this maybe will cover both online and offline, is that marketing is done effectively is not one thing. It's generally the impact of carefully integrating offline, online content, paid advertising. And the mistake I see a lot of people make is they look at Google

AdWords or they look at Facebook advertising. They think, oh, that's going to solve my problem. That makes the phone ring tomorrow. And a lot of services that sell those services, that's the promise is, hey, we'll get your leads tomorrow. And that can be great. And I'm not saying that that's not a strategy or that's not a tactic that you want to employ. It's definitely one you want to employ, but you want to do it also with direct mail, also with SEO and producing content, also with looking at your sales process to make sure that when the phone does ring, you're actually converting a few of those leads into customers. And so I get a little nervous when I see, and we go into, you know, we were working with a tree service recently, and 100% of their business was coming from AdWords.

They were doing nothing else. And lo and behold, their cost of AdWords was going up about 20% every year. So they were just having to spend more. It was like a drug. They were having to spend more to keep the phone ringing. And if they ever quit, the phone was going to stop ringing. And so a company like that, we will start integrating other forms of lead generation and really get them less dependent on just that one source. Yeah. What is your thought process? I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see is not knowing your numbers. You don't know your call booking rate. You don't know your average ticket. You don't know your conversion rate, and you don't have a tracking phone number. What would be some recommendations and advice about

that? Well, you know, I'll start with the tracking number. I mean, we do that pretty much with every client. And the idea behind that is we attach phone numbers for those that aren't familiar with it. We just have a system, a software that dynamically inserts phone numbers based on whether somebody clicked over from an ad or it can be anything called from a billboard from side of your truck. I mean, we can determine based on where that phone call came from, and then we can track that all the way to did that person become a client. So now all of a sudden what you're seeing is not only what form of advertising or what form of marketing is working, you can get even more granular with it. I mean, we'll run ad campaigns for folks and we're getting lots of clicks and it really looks like it's great. And then we find out

that people who searched for certain terms don't ever convert, don't ever turn into buyers. We don't know why, but we don't try to guess why. We let the numbers tell us and maybe we stop advertising there. The flip side of that is we see some search terms where every single time somebody searches on this and clicks on one of our ads, they become a customer. So now we're going to say we're never not going to show up one or two or three for that search term. So what it does is allows you to more effectively spend your money in wiser ways and also allows you to test and see what works and doesn't work. So you're constantly testing. But I'll also throw in here, this is the part that a lot of people really miss. A marketer comes in, they do a

brilliant campaign, you're making the phone ring, and it's not turning any more business. And generally, the breakdown is somewhere in your sales process. So make sure that you're tracking numbers on that, too. How many leads did we get? How many booked appointments did we get? How many of those booked appointments turned into clients? Because I have often found when we start working with somebody, if we tweak their sales process, we can actually get them faster results for, in some cases, not much more money. And so that, to me, is the place where most firms are leaking when it comes to growing revenue.

Yeah, that's very interesting because I just built an eight KPI system and the eight KPIs deal with leads. It starts with your lead funnel and it ends with your revenue. And there's so many things within there. And I call the lead funnel, the gasoline, because you're not ready to report gasoline on the fire until your booking rate is what it should be. And your average ticket for your industry is either equal or above what it

should be. And there's all these things that happen within a company that leak the money. And it's like, why would you do more marketing? You're not solving any problems by doing this. So do you face that a lot with your business? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, a lot of times what we'll do is we will create an ad campaign and a landing page.

And until that's converting at a certain level for somebody, we'll keep it in, I don't know what we call it, beta. Like we're not going to really up it until we prove that that will convert. And then, you know, because that's part of your KPI funnel here is if we can prove something and convert, then it's pour all the money you can on it. Right. Absolutely. You know, and there's a lot to be said. I think a lot of us out there have been burned by billboards, TV, radio, and those are all branding moves. But I met a guy the other day, he just sold his company for a hundred million bucks. And he said, he's air conditioning. I won't go into specifics, but he's all over the radio. He works with a guy in Texas who's supposed to be the guru of radio.

And he said, you know, Tommy, it was not about the radio direct response. It was really my click-through rate on Google went from 3% to 65% within a year. And can you explain to the audience about what branding can do with your online advertising and what he was talking about? Sure. So a great deal of success in the online world that we live in today and the way people buy today has to do with trust. And, you know, you think about it, like, I don't know who to hire for air conditioning. I don't ask my neighbor anymore because, you know, we built this really big fence so we didn't have to talk to each other. So, you know, now I turn online and I search and I go to Facebook and I go to Google and I try to read up on reviews about companies. And that's how I start making a decision. Well, if somebody shows up, number one, for a search term, even in

the organic results, I think we have a tendency to trust them more. If he's running the radio ads and they're hearing about him and, you him and it's set up in a way that really presents him as the expert, then all of a sudden we turn and we do that search. And now we've got a choice of four or five ads to click on. Oh, there's one I've heard of. This is the person I'm always hearing on the radio. He must be good. And so that, again, that's what's driving that combination that I talked about. That integration of those two platforms is what's driving his click-through rate in his app. Yeah, and I think that people don't understand that the time on page and to have chatbots and to have this stuff, it all culminates into more business. And people don't understand the trust factor and the quality score of Google.

And I always tell people, look, 70% of all services are found online. 70% of those are found on Google. That means half of your marketing should evolve around an SEO strategy. It should be content. It should be video. It should be everything because it gets found on Google. I mean, what is your philosophy as far as where do I get started today? Let me give you an example. Let me ask you a specific. I have a couple of technicians, and these guys are my all-stars, okay?

I've got 90 technicians. And they said, Tommy, what can we do? We just feel like we've been a little slow lately. And, I mean, look, I post 1,000 ads a day on Craigslist. We've got 400 five-star reviews on Yelp. I'm Angie's's Super Service Award seven years in a row, BBB, Torsh Award. I mean, you name it. If there's a mailer out there, I do it. I'm TV, radio, billboards. What do I do out of the box? And, you know, we do guerrilla marketing. We've got our trucks wrapped. I mean, you name it. What can I do to get these guys more jobs?

I'm just curious to hear a real-life scenario of something outside of the box. I don't know how outside of the box this is, but I don't see many people doing it. And I've done it over the years in a number of cases. It's been extremely effective. And that's strategic partnership. So I might recommend that those folks turn to a couple technicians in some other related services, home services, that, you know, you think these are best of class folks too, roofer, painter, carpenter,

you know, electrician, HVAC company. And you start trading, not trading leads, but you start marketing for each other. So when your technician goes into a home, he's got in his back pocket 10% off or $25 off or something from two other services. And those two other services are actually doing that with your folks, too. And so now all of a sudden that homeowner got a trusted person, hopefully, in their house that's now saying, hey, here's a couple other services. If you're needing garage doors, you know, this is who we work with. This is who we trust. And by the way, you know, for being such a great customer, here's 10% off. That has been a really powerful way to kind of ramp up some exposure that's really right there at the front door.

So how do you build those type of relationships? What's the best way to get started with a process like that? Well, I tell you what I'd do is I'd find six or eight people. And again, not just because you think that they could send you business. Some of you want to recommend because you're going to be referring them too. So you want to make sure that you best of class, you've checked them out know the best way to refer you to our customers. And I guarantee you, if you send 10 letters like that, you will get about eight of them back or you'll get a phone call or you'll get an email back. And then you just propose that idea of doing some co-marketing.

So do you think there's some tracking behind that? I mean, the biggest complaint that I hear about this process and I'm a huge fan of it, is I can barely get my guys to do what I want them to do and sell what I want them to sell. Why would I want them selling your stuff? How do you combat that? Because I think that everybody listening out there, very few of you might say, yeah, we could absolutely take on another product to endorse. Yeah, well, so the easiest way to do it is, I mean, make it part of the checkout process. In most cases, I'm assuming you go, you've got a work order. A lot of cases, you're picking up the check or you're at least leaving an invoice or

receipt of some force. So it doesn't have to be a formal sales process where they're at, they're promoting it. It can just be part of what gets left behind. And then what you do is you just put some sort of tracking mechanism. It's pretty easy to get. What I used to do is we'd get kind of what we used to call a third sheet size piece of paper. And you get a printer to number those things even or to code them somehow. So you know when those are coming back that maybe you're rewarding your technician some small token for every one of those that comes back and turns into work. So there are a number of ways to do it. But yeah, you don't necessarily want to look at it as something else they have to do. You want to look at it as part

of the process. That's great advice. I love that concept. You know, we use a pretty advanced CRM, and I'm not getting any money to promote them or anything, but I use a company called Service Titan. Right now, I've got 2,000 call tracking numbers. How important is it to have a CRM in the home service niche that you love, and what are some of the things to look for when you're picking a CRM? Sure. Well, I think a CRM, and just again, I'm sure you've told people it stands for customer relationship management. It's just a fancy term for software that allows you to file away. You know, we used to, back in the old days, we'd have files on customers.

Here's when I called them or, you know, here's the last work we did for them. Well, this all goes in the software now. I think it can be extremely important because, you know, a lot of businesses we work with, you know, the easiest place to go get business is from existing customers. And so you want to be able to have a tool that makes it easy for you to reach out to say, hey, here's the spring special. Here's what's going on this week. You know, when they call up and say, oh, you know, we've got such and such that you've got to easily have the record of, you know, what you installed or what work you had done in the past. So I think it's extremely important. Now, having said that, there's a lot of that software out there that does 6,000 things, and you will only use two and a half dozen of them. So you want to make sure that you are looking at software that is

appropriate to your size of business, that it may be not overly complex. There's no reason for you to be paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month for software if, in fact, you're just trying to keep track of 300 or 400 customers. So there are $29 options, $29 a month options as well. Now, a lot of industries and the home services industry is probably one of the ones that's done this the most, the service titan that you mentioned is, you know, one of the beauties of those ones that are industry specific is that they have things like estimating and things that maybe even scheduling of your technicians, you know, can all be built into that. So you can

actually, with some of those tools, they go beyond being a CRM and they really become an operations tool as well. So, you know, I definitely think everybody in the world we live in today, your customers expect electronic records, they expect an app, you know, they expect to be able to contact you on a mobile device. I mean, so you can go overboard, but I think you do have to stay. The days of kind of handwriting proposals or estimates and leaving them under the doormat are probably over. Yeah, I agree. One of the things I wanted to ask you is I met a marketer. He's one of the bigger marketers in the state of Arizona, and he does all the casinos and the Arizona lottery. And he said, Tommy, the most important thing that you possess is your list and you need to nurture that list and you need to send

regular emails. And my question to you would be, explain to me why I need to do that. But more importantly, is tell me how to do that. What is a system that you like to do to communicate on a regular basis with that's simple and the listeners can get started today on? Sure. So, first off, I do agree with that. Now, there are certain businesses, you know, when they talk about the list, I mean, that's their whole prospecting list and whatnot. But even nurturing a customer list, I mean, there's so many businesses that you install an air conditioner. Well, that air conditioner is going to need service.

And you're going to want to make sure that those people remember who installed that air conditioner. So just staying top of mind. You may have other products and services that you sell. Staying top of mind is really important. To do it effectively, though, you don't just want to blast once a week saying, hey, special on this, special on that. You might get some business that way, but you're mostly going to irritate people. So the way we like to do this is that we come up with, and you can call it a newsletter or you can call it whatever you want to call it, but you come up with a way to share useful information. So the home services business has been very traditional to do this approach. I mean, there's a lot of things that need to be done around the home, particularly seasonally.

And so sharing information know, sharing information about what a homeowner should be thinking about is probably useful information. And you do that three or four times, then you sort of earn the right to say, oh, and by the way, we have this new line of XYZ that is, you know, people are loving and getting this and we're going to have a 25% off intro sale. So kind of taking that approach of being welcome in the inbox by sending useful information and then using that as a vehicle to stay both top of mind and to share kind of business objectives like a sale or a promotion. Now to the tool part, I'm guessing Service Titan probably has an email service provider component. I don't know that software at all,

but a lot of CRM tools have some sending and marketing automation components. But short of that, there are dozens of what we call email service providers. MailChimp is one most people have probably heard of that are either free or low cost ways for you to send several hundred emails, schedule several hundred emails, create templates so that it makes it ways for you to send several hundred emails, schedule several hundred emails,

you know, create templates so that it makes it easy for you to send because you can't be sending these mass emails through your Gmail account. Google will say no to that. And so will your internet service providers. So you have to use one of these outside services, but, you know, you can do this for $50 a month or less, or you can use a service, you know you can do this for fifty dollars a month or less or you can use a service you know like uh one that we're pretty high on it's called active campaign that it acts as your crm an active campaign is really really nice and what i like about active campaign is when you pull in certain information it gives you their linkedin profile it gives you their facebook their twitter all their social media.

And I think that that's an incredible tool to communicate with people. One of the things that I think was amazing that I found out in the last couple of years, Domino's CEO, the pizza company, was doing a seminar. And he said, what do you think I or my company, you know, Domino's makes the most money on? Is it crazy bread? Is it our soda? Is it our cheese? You know, is it the pizza? And it turns out it was the data and the data that they possess is so useful. And I think really identifying who your real avatar is and not having a shotgun approach and more of a rifle shot. Tell me a little bit how you do that and what that means to the listeners out there. Yeah, there's no question.

I mean, you know, a lot of times if somebody sells something that a homeowner needs, the belief is, well, anybody that owns a home is our ideal customer. And so we try to get them to narrow their focus because generally speaking, their ideal customer is their most profitable customer and is generally speaking the customer that is referring business as well. And so whatever, you know, the common characteristics, and that's what we do is the first step I work with any business, we go and we have them rank their customers by profitability. And, you know, there can be market segments, like maybe you do commercial work and residential work, but we'll just group it in and we'll say, okay, what type of work is profitable? So, you know, for an HVAC contractor, it might be a certain type of new installation. That's their most profitable work. And yet they're willing to do pretty much anything. And so a lot of times what we'll do when we go through this process of kind of showing,

you know, what's our most profitable, whether it's customer or type of project, a couple of things happen. First off, it's sometimes the first time they've really thought about what their most profitable kind of work is. And it's also a case where they go, gosh, we don't even really do this kind of work. Why are we servicing this type of thing that we don't really do anymore? We're not really good at anymore. We should stop doing that. And a lot of times they're losing money on, you know, kind of work like that, that they're just doing because they always did. So it allows them to identify here's the work we should be focusing on. And

here's the work we should stop doing maybe altogether or refer off to somebody else. And once we do that process, then we can start looking at, okay, what are the common characteristics of the person that buys that services? Obviously, demographics, you know, that I was doing this work with a tree service recently. And this really kind of seemed odd to me, because I've gotten my trees trimmed since we owned our first house. But apparently, a lot of people don't trim their trees till they're over 50. Because, you know, I guess you got you got little kids running around, you got all kinds of other concerns, you know, you're still trying to pay the mortgage and that 56 year old sitting

there out there looking like that tree going to fall on our house. And so they call the tree service. So, you know, understanding things like that allows you to then choose where you're going to advertise. Definitely choose your message. A 55-year-old homeowner maybe cares about the different things than a 35-year-old homeowner, and you better be saying those things in your ads as well as sending them to them based on the demographic information. So a lot of the work we do is getting people to narrow who they're focused on, and in some cases, narrowly re-forecast kind of what their most profitable work is so that they, you know, maybe stop doing some of the other work. I'll give you one other example. We had a remodeling contractor that we were working with, you know, their minimum

kitchen starts at about $50,000 for a remodeling, up to several hundred thousand dollars. And yet, if you called them when I started working with them them and you had a gutter that was kind of hanging off your house, they'd come out and fix it. Well, every single time they did that, they lost money because they just couldn't afford, you know, they weren't set up to do that. So that was an example of, you know, really got them out of that kind of work so that they could stay focused on where they made the money. Yeah. What is your thought process on, I've learned over the last couple years is service contracts, I get in, they're cheap. I don't really make a lot of money on service contracts, but I know that I'm going to service that garage door until you need a new one. If you own a wood door, we're going to be doing a protected coat each year.

I'm making a little bit of money, but it's definitely not going to change my business. But the day that they want to replace that door is the day that I really, it's a payoff that's down the line. Tell me a little bit about your thought process on service contracts and how important those are. Well, I think they're extremely important. You know, unfortunately, when I started doing this, they were a novel still, and boy, they were moneymakers for people because, you know, they could charge a premium for them that got in the house, you know, twice a year, like you said, to, you know, kind of suss out all the other issues that they might be able to sell. So they're almost like paid sales calls is what I used to call them. But, you know, it's gotten very competitive. I mean, everybody

does it now. You can spend several thousand dollars a year on, you know, service agreements with all the different services that people offer. But I still think that they're extremely important for a couple of reasons. Not only do they help you keep that sticker on the thing or that magnet on the refrigerator so that you stay top of mind, I think with a lot of companies, they also help keep their technicians in front of customers. They help keep their technicians busy. I mean, even if it's a break-even or barely making money on the actual call itself, you're keeping that technician engaged and busy. And I personally think that if companies are going through ups and downs and highs and lows,

it may not even be a compensation thing, but I think you run the risk of losing some of your staff if you can't keep them engaged. So it could be worth doing some loss leader kind of activity to keep your technicians engaged. I got it. I think that that's great advice. So let's talk a little bit about creating a marketing system, which you guys do. It's a systematic versus tactical approach. I think I've heard some of the first things you guys get started with, but when I'm really thinking about taking my

marketing to the next level, what are some of the questions that I need to be getting ready to answer and be thinking about? Well, we've talked about a couple of them. The first and foremost is who is our ideal customer? I mean, do we have them today? Do we know who they are? Is there somebody else we should be attracting that we're not? You know, we're going to have a lot of discussion about that ideal customer. And this is not to say that you won't service anyone outside of this description, but most of your marketing, your messaging, the first thing I see on your website is going to be addressing a problem that that ideal customer, that we know that ideal customer has. So the second component then is now that we know who

that ideal customer is, what can we know about them? And a lot of times it's, we're going to go out and ask questions. We, in fact, one of the processes we do when we're working on a messaging strategy is we'll interview six or eight clients of our clients and we'll push them a little bit on, you know, tell me a story about when they provided good service. And what we tend to find is we'll start hearing themes about what your customers really appreciate. And experience tells me it's probably not what you're saying on your website right now, because, you know, most businesses, business owners, marketers want to talk about all the great stuff that they do and how great their business is when the customer just cares about the fact that you showed up on time and you cleaned up the job site. I'll tell you another great, it's become, as companies have gotten very focused on, rightly so, on getting reviews.

It's amazing how often we will find messages, what you should be saying, right in those reviews. I'll give you an example going back to this tree service. It's a third-generation family-owned local business. They kind of were promoting that as their big thing. And that was nice to have. I mean, there were some national companies coming in that maybe didn't have the reputation for service. So it was nice to have a local business family-owned. we went and read the reviews and almost every single one of them said exactly this, some form of this. They showed up when they made the appointment to come and, you

know, we could hardly tell they'd been there when they left. So they took down a tree and cleaned up the job, didn't leave ruts in the yard. And, you know, over and over and over again, those are the five star reviews. And that's the messaging that now resides at the top of their website because that's the problem they're solving. So those, you know, we almost don't pass go until we feel really good about those two components, the ideal customer and the core message. And then it's a matter of saying, okay, where does this ideal customer hang out? You know, how can we start reaching them? Content is increasingly, we know people are turning to the web to do searches. So we're going to produce content. We know that. We know that

we're going to try to take advantage of the fact that when somebody turns to Google and types in HVAC contractor or heat pump installation that they're looking to buy a heat pump. So we want to make sure that we're showing up for that in ads as well. We're going to do offline things. I still am a firm believer in targeted direct mail, in getting some local press mentions, because all of those things work together. And that's kind of the idea behind the system is that we're going to choose all these tactics based on strategy, but all these things are going to be integrated. And then lastly, this probably should go first sometimes, but we build it last. We're going to track what's working, what's not working so that we can just go to work on improving. Installing a marketing system is not set it and forget it. It's set it up based on

what we believe is the best approach and then to continue to evolve it based on the data. I love it. So let's just do a hypothetical scenario. You just got a new account and I've got, let's be realistic, I've got a couple grand to spend and a brand new company. What's the first three things you do in the first 30 days to start generating me business? You know who my perfect client is. You've gone through the interviews. You've done the process. What are we going to do today?

Are you going to turn on some PPC just for instant results and have a long-term strategy of SEO, or what is it? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, especially just getting started. So we really don't have a lot of ability to get you to rank. I mean, getting somebody who doesn't have a lot of customers, hasn't been in business a long time, you know, getting them search engine optimization or search engine results is going to take four, five, six months, maybe, of continued work.

So the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to go and we're going to look at in your town, in your community, we're going to look at who is dominating in the pay-per-click space, you know, or who's at least spending on that so that they're showing up, you know, one, two, three. We're going to look at what they're offering on their landing pages. And a lot of ways, we're going to do research to figure out how to get you in there, how to, you know, figure out if they're, you know, a lot of times people will advertise for very high purchase intent words. And so, you know, we're going to try to analyze, I mean, there are some home services phrases that are $30, $40, $50 a click. We don't have

the money to blow through that budget for you. And so we're going to get really serious about what are the lower cost, longer tail phrases that we can start getting you, you know, three, four or five clicks, maybe a day that turn into phone calls. Yeah, that's an interesting concept. Guess how much Garage Door Repair Phoenix is per click? It's $35. $70. $70.

It's pretty incredible. Yeah, I'm never going to rank for the first one. I mean, I already ranked for one of the first organically, but I'm not interested in going after that per click because it doesn't pay off. So you talked a lot. You've been known to talk about a lot of referrals in your book. And I believe in a referral engine. Forty percent of my clients are referrals. Tell me a little bit about how to turn on this customer referral cycle. Sure. I mean, when somebody's getting 40%

of their business being by way of referral, it usually tells me they're doing a good job. People like the process. They like what they did. So they're willing to tell their neighbors, maybe voluntarily, tell their neighbors about a great experience. Well, you run into a business like that and you just think about all the people out there that could be motivated then or incentivized or at least made it easy for them to refer you. So what we like to do is set up, and there's never one. We like to set up three or four different ways that you can keep that idea of referrals top of mind. And again, I think making it easy for your customers is step number one. So again, going back to your technician who has that

contact with them, that's your first point of contact who could actually then be putting in your customer's hand, here's three $25 coupons. You know, if any of these come back, we'll give you a gift certificate or, you know, whatever that you're giving them something tangible to hand out. You know, that's point number one. Then I think about four times a year, do a mailing to your customers. Same thing. Maybe they bought from you six months ago and they don't know anybody who needs a new garage door,

but they get this mailer from you that has three coupons on it. And all of a sudden it's like, you know, I just talked to somebody about that. I think I'll give them this. So, you know, keep that top of mind. And then we already talked about the strategic partners. I see that as a referral engine as well, because a lot of ways what they're doing is they are

referring you, they're co-marketing, but they're also saying, hey, we trust these people too. So having a few things going on at once is really key to staying top of mind. Because a lot of times referrals just happen because somebody mentioned it that day. Well, you don't always know when that's going to be. So you've got to be reminding them several times a year. And then the last piece that we typically try to do with folks is, and this doesn't work for every business, but do something to reward your referral champions. If you've got people that those 40% that are referring, there's probably a handful of your customers that are really referring. So figure out a way to do something for them. And sometimes just appreciation is enough. Sometimes doing, a lot of times we have clients we'll work with where we'll have them do an event. So we have a remodeling contractor that does a quarterly event. And that event will be with past customers.

It'll be in one of their homes that they did a remodel on. So they're happy to invite people. And then we'll bring in somebody that can do a wine tasting or somebody that is well-known in the community for art or something. And so it's a nice appreciation event that they are bringing referrals or at least friends and neighbors to. So, you know, kind of create your highest level of champions, you know, kind of thing. And a lot of times that'll actually get people to refer just by showing that appreciation or that level of engagement. I love that idea. Having an event, that's something I just wrote down. It's great. Yeah. And hire a videographer at the event and get a whole bunch of testimonials on video. That is genius. All right. I like it. So I do a lot of direct mail and I think we've done a pretty good job on figuring out. See with ValPak, they'll allow you to change per zone. So each zone you could change the ad and each zone is 10,000 homes.

And what we found is so many people out there, they'll have five phone numbers for every phone number in Metro Detroit. They'll have three phone numbers for Phoenix. And it makes you seem like a huge company that's not customer focused. That's one of the things I think really is a turnoff with large companies is they make those mistakes. Tell me some really good marketing strategies and tips for direct mail in this 2018 and what's to come. Yeah, you know, that's a tough one because direct mail has a pretty hard cost, you know, for a lot of folks, just like all advertising. But, you know, you create that thing and it's not, you know, AdWords campaign, you can test it for a day and say, oh, that didn't work and turn it off. But you buy a zone,

you hope, you cross your fingers and hope that produces something. What I think you have to do is you have to very carefully monitor the return on direct mail. You have to get as laser focused as possible about the targeting. So make sure that you're not sending it in areas that you either don't work or don't want to work. That's a mistake. I sometimes see people, they're getting leads and they're not in an area geographically where they actually want to work. So you want to make sure of that. And then the other thing that we've been experimenting with is partnering with some community events or community nonprofits and actually using the direct mail as a way to both

promote them and ourselves or our client. And it's been producing some interesting returns because particularly if you are promoting, say, a nonprofit or an event that's going on that your customer, your target customer really cares about, you actually, you know, it's somewhat of a branding play, but you also get a lot of trust. And in some cases, you get that nonprofit or that event actually incentivized to do some promotional work in addition. Yeah, yeah. This is all great, amazing things.

And I think that could go a long way. One of the things I wanted to ask you, this will be one of the final questions before we tell people how to get more of you. I really am getting into geofencing, programmatic targeting, some of these things that are outside of the norm, newer technology and forest notifications, things of that nature. Tell me your thought process on this new technology and how to couple it with what we're already doing. Sure. You know, I'm going to be the first to admit, I don't always chase the newest technology because there are so many people

that actually just need to be doing some of the basics. They're not even doing those first. And I think sometimes some of this newer technology, if you've got Facebook ad campaigns and you've got funnels and you're capturing leads and you have a great conversion process and now it's like, okay, what do I do to take it up another? And you can start experimenting with some of these newer technologies.

I don't have any clients that we have doing geofencing or even programmatic advertising with at this point. And it's not because I don't think those are good things. It's mainly because I think that they're not appropriate for 99% of the folks out there. And I think in some ways, they actually become a distraction because, you know, somebody talks about some new technology and instead of actually getting our messaging right or setting up an email campaign, we're chasing some of the new technology. So hopefully that wasn't probably a very satisfying. No, no, I like that answer. I think that, you know, a lot of us as entrepreneurs,

we get the next shiny ball syndrome and we might not have a good email campaign going, but now all of a sudden we're looking at something new that we, you know, the next shiny object. So that's a great answer. Okay, good. So, John, tell me a little bit about, you've written five books. Tell me. So John, tell me a little bit about, you've written five books. Tell me about these books and tell me a little bit about how,

if the audience listening, they want to get more of you, where they should go and where to buy your books and which ones you recommend for the home service. Well, so all of my books can be found at Amazon. Most of them can be found at pretty much any bookstore, you know, Barnes and Nobles of the world. My first book is Duct Tape Marketing. And that's really most of what we've talked about today is in that book. So I'm going to talk to home services folks.

And I do speak at a lot of heating and cooling conventions and, you know, manufacturers conventions. And, you know, that's the book that I think most applies to the home services businesses. Now, the second book is called The Referral Engine. And as we talked about, it's primarily focused on that, really any business, but certainly there are a lot of businesses that are very referral driven. So it gives them kind of a deep dive. My next book was The Commitment Engine. And there I just wanted to write kind of a personal, what I think it takes to build a business. So I get into vision and I get into purpose more in that book. The Duct Tape Selling was my book that I wrote really for that salesperson who I think in today's world needs to think a little more like a marketer, that needs to think about content and reputation

and building authority and not just going out there and trying to close deals. And then my last book is called SEO for Growth. And I wrote that book really for really try to uncomplicate search engine optimization and kind of talk about how it fits into the marketer and entrepreneurs world. It's not purely a technical marketing practice anymore. It's kind of risen to the strategic level because of the way people buy. As far as finding more out about me, it's pretty easy. It's ducttapemarketing.com, D-U-C-T-T-A-P-E, marketing.com. And you'll find I have a podcast there that I've been doing for years, a blog, lots of e-books, lots of education. Obviously, all my other books can be found there.

And you can actually find some of the marketing consulting packages that we offer that we can tailor to really any of your listeners. I love it, John. Is there any other books outside of what you mentioned that you think really would have a good impact on some of the listeners? Any favorites in your past that you recommend? Well, I tend to recommend books that are – I'm turning around right now looking at my bookshelf because I've got – like a lot of people like me, I've got hundreds of books here. Sure. I tend to recommend a lot of books that are similar to my point of view, that break down things in practical sense. And there's a whole lot of books out there that are written for people that like Amazon or Zappos, which are great stories,

but they don't necessarily apply to the small business owners. So I'm looking at Content Inc. Yeah. Is one recently. These tend to be a little more theory, but I'm a big fan of Seth Godin's books. Yeah. Actually, I'm in the middle of a book. I end up getting sent a lot of books because of my podcast. And so they weren't ones that I sometimes seek out. But I'm reading a very interesting book I'll just throw out there by Michael Veltri. And he's a consultant. It's called The Mushin Way.

And it's essentially his thoughts on leadership and building a business based on the martial art of Aikido or at least the principles of that Japanese martial art. It's just an interesting read. I like to read different things sometimes because you get new perspectives. It's pretty easy to stay in the bubble and kind of read the same stuff all the time. And so I often, for my own personal reading, seek out books on topics unrelated to marketing. That's great. Well, John, is there anything that I might have left out

that you want to share with the audience? The last bit of knowledge? Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity, but I've, you know, I've just let it all go. I think we shared a ton. I appreciate the opportunity. You did an amazing job, John, and I'm really, really excited you came on. I'm going to read your book and hopefully get you on here in a few months. Really appreciate everything, and I hope you have a great weekend. You bet. Thanks so much. Thanks, John. Bye-bye. This was the Home Service Expert podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12-hour days, seven days a week?

If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today. I will repeat that. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book your free call today.