Will Hanke has two passions: supporting our US veterans and helping window treatment and awning businesses tell their story online – providing them with increased exposure, more customers, and higher revenues. For over twenty-seven years he has helped mom & pops, startups, and multi-million dollar companies with their digital marketing strategies.

Will hosts monthly online training events and has spoken at conferences across the US on a wide variety of topics from analytics to lead generation through his company, Window Treatment Marketing Pros.

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William Hanke (00:00.046)
Today, I’ve got a bowl full of questions. I’m going to pull them out one by one and we’ll talk through them. It’s time for another episode of marketing pains. The podcast about marketing for window treatment and awning companies. Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing Panes. The podcast where we dive into real marketing conversations for window treatment and awning pros. I’m Will Hanke and today we’re doing something a little different.

So instead of a guest, I’m pulling questions straight out of real conversations I’ve had this year. Some came up during discovery calls, others from pros who are following along and just trying to figure out their marketing. These are real things people want to know whether they’re about to hire or they’re still running things themselves. So today I’ve got a bowl full of questions. I’m going to pull them out one by one and we’ll talk through them. So, all right, I’ve got my fancy Home Depot bucket here, paint bucket.

I were remodeling the bathroom downstairs. So I just thought I’d use this before I filled it with paint. So what I want to do is obviously just pull out some different questions and see what they are, answer them lives. By the way, I’ve got 27 different questions in here that we’ve identified over the course of this entire year that are the most common questions. So, all right, let me just pull one out. See what we got here. How should I deal with negative or low star reviews? All right.

Throw that in the trash. So low star reviews. The first thing that I would do is not reply. So I would write a reply to a one or two star review, but don’t publish it. You need some time to kind of chill and relax and get over that initial anger. So we tend to tell our clients, take a day or two to relax, write the review. And then after those 48 hours or so, go back and rewrite it.

And maybe even consider using chat GPT to help you make it a little bit less angry and a little bit more factual. I think people respond well to one star reviews if a very good reply comes along with it. So listen, people understand we’re running a business and sometimes customers just aren’t great. But if you have a great written review, a reply after that, then

William Hanke (02:23.885)
A lot of times that makes people think you’re more real, more legit. And I’ve even heard people comment that 0.8 stars is better than five only because it makes you look more like a real company. So we all have those customers. We all get those kinds of one-star reviews from time to time. Take some time before you reply. Make sure you craft a reply and make sure you do reply for sure, but just, you know, don’t do it fully in anger. Do it very factual.

And hopefully that will actually help your business down the road. All right, let’s grab another one out of here. Put that down. Can I spend $10 a day on Google ads? Sure. I wouldn’t recommend it. That is $300 a month. For our clients, we recommend that they start at $1,500 a month, which is what? 50 bucks a day.

Um, the reason is a couple of things. $300 a month is going to get you one or maybe two leads in a new Google ad campaign. You should expect to pay between 160 and $210 per lead. So by recommending 1500 as a starting point, you should expect to get seven or so leads out of that money out of that spend. If you’re decent at sales and you close four of those seven.

If the average job is, let’s say four grand, that’s about the average for, for a room that’s a $16,000 in revenue for $1,500 spend. Pretty nice return. If you’re spending $300 a day, one of the problems is early on in a Google ad campaign, Google puts you into a learning phase and that learning phase is learning who is going to engage with your ads. Who’s going to convert into an actual customer.

And at $300 a month, when you are getting, let’s just say $200 cost per lead, that one lead per month is not enough for Google. There’s not enough meat on the bone for Google to really do a good job of getting you in front of the right people. If you only want to spend $10 a day, I would probably recommend doing some good SEO on your site, the best you can. We’ve got a great SEO masterclass that you can go through for free.

William Hanke (04:47.053)
and then run Facebook retargeting ads. So basically people that have already been exposed to your brand in some way, you can follow them around on Facebook, probably have a hard time spending $10 a day on retargeting ads on Facebook. That’s probably where I would put my money. if you want to do Google ads, you’re going to need to be spending closer to that 40, $50 a month or a day, which sounds horrible, but.

Listen, if you can put a dollar in and $10 comes out, how many dollars do you want to put in? Now the other piece to that is the cost per lead doesn’t stay at that 160 to 210. If we can drive that cost per lead down to 150, 140, even a hundred dollars or lower, that would be fantastic, right? We’re not asking you to spend more money, but you’re getting more leads for the same spend. So that’s a better approach.

Than just trying to spend a couple hundred bucks a month on Google ads probably save that money and put it elsewhere Alright next question. Is it better to do SEO or ads first? So good aunt good question the Correct way to do this is you need to start on SEO right away And I saw one of the other questions in the bucket that was how long does SEO take SEO can take eight months nine months twelve months to really start to gain momentum

And depending on how many other people in your town are also doing SEO, you know, that could really stretch out. So you have to run ads while you’re working on your SEO. Both of these have to work in tandem. Ads are going to get the phone to ring now. SEO is going to get the phone to ring later. The idea is as your SEO really starts to gain momentum, maybe you can pull some of that ad budget back.

or divert some of that ad budget to next door or Facebook or Instagram, some of these other places and just really start to increase that momentum as things go on. But they really need to work together. All right. Let’s grab another question. Let’s see what we got here. How much time do I need to invest each month into a valuable marketing campaign?

William Hanke (07:01.299)
So this depends on if you’re able to hire a company to do it. If you’re able to hire a company like mine to do your ongoing marketing, you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time working with the marketing company monthly strategy calls or quarterly strategy calls. Make sure that everybody is working in the same direction is always a great thing. after initial onboarding and sign up, which can get a little time intensive, ongoing can be pretty small.

Now, if you’re not able to hire a marketing company, then it really just comes down to how much time can you put in? You’re busy running a business, which takes a lot of your time. Do you also have time to do the marketing piece of that as well? We provide a lot of resources to help people with that so that you can get to the point where you can actually hire a marketing company like us. But early on, it’s a lot of guerrilla marketing.

getting out there and pounding the pavement, optimizing your site, getting a well-built ad library going. There’s a lot of moving pieces to it, but it is very possible to do yourself. It’s just going to require a lot of time outside of actually running your business as well. It just depends on what that trade-off is. Is it better to spend that money and have somebody doing that? If you have that revenue, obviously, if you don’t have that revenue, then it’s a pretty much a no brainers.

All right, let’s grab another one. this is a short one. What is geofencing? So geofencing is basically drawing a fence around a specific physical area on the globe and showing ads to that area. An example could be, let’s say you got a budget blinds in town and you want to run ads to people that are in their parking lot.

Is it the best use of your spend? Probably not because if somebody has already gone to budget and decided that’s where they’re going to go or Home Depot or Costco or wherever, most likely that’s where they’re going to make their decision, right? If they suddenly see an ad for ABC blinds in town, they’re probably not going to engage with that business. So maybe not the best use of your money, but you know, if you can get it really cheap, there’s, can run geofencing.

William Hanke (09:19.867)
ads without, you know, without issue, but that’s what it is. Basically just drawing a, a, not really a square drawing some sort of shape around a location and showing ads specifically in that location. All right. Let’s see what we got next. Do next door ads work. So about maybe close to a year ago now next door revamped their ad platform. Prior to that, it was pretty sketchy.

Wasn’t great, but the revamp that they did really up, up to their game on the ad side of things. So do they work? Yes, they work fantastically. You can really dial down on subdivisions, zip codes, very specific areas that you want your ads to show. And you can get pretty direct with those. We have a lot of clients that obviously start with Google ads. Maybe they’ll add Facebook ads as a secondary or.

Yelp or Nextdoor as that secondary where they really just want to gain more momentum. I would not recommend Nextdoor as the first piece of your strategy. Google ads is pretty much always that piece, but Nextdoor ads do work. You can get very local. You can get very specific on affluent parts of your town, those sorts of things, and really reach out to the right.

clientele. I think the bigger jobs are in those, you know, more affluent areas typically or new construction, those types of things. But yes, absolutely. They do work. So, all right, let’s pull another one out of here. Is it worth signing up for online directories? Yes. So online directories, business type directories are a fantastic citation related tool. And one of the things that Google looks at

In order to rank people in the Google maps area is the amount of citations they have. Citations are mentions of your business around the web where it lists your name and your address and your phone. Typically those things, it might add a link to your business, but it might not. Google smart enough to know if name, address, and phone match that they’ll actually count that as a link for your business. So the more online directories that you can get listed on.

William Hanke (11:41.96)
the better off you are. Now the more relevant, meaning industry related or local related business directories that you can be on, those are even better because they send signals to Google about who you are, but also that you work in this specific area. So those are fantastic. Now we actually have an online directory called America’s best window treatments. That is a fantastic place to get your business listed. It has been.

noted as a citation source in a lot of things, including chat GPT. So we have clients or we have customers now that are going to chat GPT, typing in who is the best window treatment company near me and chat GPT. Those language models are using citation sources to make those decisions and recommendations.

for the best company near this person, this searcher. Absolutely. Business directories are a great place to start. A couple ideas there. So we use brightlocal.com as the source for building citations and monitoring those citations. There’s also Yext. Y-E-X-T is fairly popular. There’s one called Moz Local, M-O-Z Local. And one of the best well-known ones is out of Canada. It’s called Whitespark.

Whitespark.ca. Cool thing about Whitespark is you can go and type in like what you do, window treatments, and then you can put your area and it will find you a lot of local business directories that you can add yourself to. Now, in addition, obviously joining the chamber, the BNI, if any of those list you on their sites, those are great ways of getting additional very local citations. And another way to do that is Little League Sponsorships.

Sites like that where you’re typically donating money in exchange for some sort of sponsorship. Those tend to work really well, although a lot of times they expire after a season or a certain amount of time. All right. Next question. Are trade shows worth it or a waste of time? So trade shows, home shows, those sorts of things. Most of our clients do these in their local town, their local home show.

William Hanke (13:55.513)
And absolutely worth their time. In most cases, they’re not terribly expensive to get a booth at these shows. is a great brand exposure play. If you have something there that you can give away, let’s say a brochure or something, maybe a little nicer than just a flyer. But if there’s something you can give away where people will be able to reference that at a later point, I think those are all great options. And again,

a great brand exposure play more than lead generation. It’s just another opportunity for you to stay top of mind. Now on the other side of that is trade shows where you’re going to the sun shading expo for, for instance, and looking at all the vendors that are offering services for your business. These are great to go to as well. If you’re looking for new vendors.

If you’re looking to upgrade some of the things that you offer, maybe add some new lines in. course, these are great places to go. Everybody’s in one spot. You can have those conversations. You can learn more about their products. A lot of times you can see their products. You can play with their products. You can ask questions to their reps or to their salespeople about how the products work. And then of course, get pricing all of that as well. So absolutely worth going and checking out.

A lot of our clients will go every two to three years, it seems like, and they’ll usually time it around when the trade show is a little closer. So travel is not as expensive. For instance, we’ll be at the Sun Shading Expo here in November. I think it’s November 5 through 7. And that is a fantastic show. If you’re wanting to look for new vendors related to window treatments, awnings.

exterior shading. All of those are going to be in one place at this show in Indianapolis this year. Very excited to be at the show. And if it’s centrally located this year, which is really nice. So if you’re looking for an opportunity to go to a trade show, that’s probably the best one that you can go to right now. I’ll put a link to that in the description below at sunshadingexpo.com. All right. Let’s finish up with one more question here. I’m going to choose.

William Hanke (16:11.784)
this one. What sort of report should I expect from a marketing agency? Great question. So at the end of the day, the best report is again, as I mentioned earlier, you put a dollar in and $10 came out. That’s a great report, right? You know that things are working. Now that’s pretty generic because you need to get a little bit more specific about maybe you put a dollar in one

program and $20 came out, you put it in another program and no money came out, right? So you still want to see some sort of lead source report that shows by lead source, how many leads are we getting? How many of those are turning into opportunities and how many of those are we actually closing? And having that information by lead source is really going to help you with strategy and show you, you know, we put money into Google ads.

And we got this out, we put money into Facebook retargeting. We got this out. We put money into some door hangers and this is what we got out of that. So having all that tracking in place and then looking at it by source is really the ultimate goal for you to know what’s working, what to do more of and what maybe not to do more of as well. That is probably the best report that we provide for our customers.

because it is the one that tells them if it’s working or not. The average customer needs around 12 touches before they engage with a business. 12 touches is a lot of touches. So maybe you’re running Facebook ads and maybe you’re boosting a post on Facebook and they see you as they’re scrolling through. They might not engage with that, but just the fact that you’re staying top of mind because they scrolled past you on that.

That does count and it should get some attribution at the end of the day towards creating that final sale. However, typically we only are able to track the first attribution, the first touch point with a business and, or the last one, the last thing they did before they actually set the appointment. But in reality, there’s a lot of other pieces in between there that you don’t get. sometimes those lead source attribution reports are not a hundred percent accurate.

William Hanke (18:28.444)
but should still give you a decent idea. If you’re running things like call tracking on your Google business profile and on your Facebook ads and your Google ads, you’ll be able to directly tell that this phone call came because of this platform. So that’s nice. But again, there were probably touches before that that helped encourage that person to decide to reach out to you. Lots of different ways you can go about this. And you should be doing a lot of these things.

It’s just hard to be able to do all of these things and know that they’re working or not working. So cost per lead is probably another report item that we always report on because at the end of the day, that’s what clients want to know. How much did I spend to acquire leads this month? And what was the conversion rate for those leads? So I could have got a hundred leads, but if they were really bad quality, I only closed three of them.

That’s not as great as getting 25 leads and closing 50 % of them. Right. So it doesn’t just count on eyeballs or impressions on your brand, but more importantly cost per lead. How much did it cost you to actually get a lead? And then did they convert into actual business actual signed proposals? All right. If any of these questions sounded familiar, you’re not alone.

These are the things that window treatment pros are really asking and talking through them helps them make smarter decisions about where to spend their time and money. If today’s episode gave you something useful, share it with another business owner in the trade. And don’t forget to follow Marketing Panes for more practical straight shooting marketing advice. Thanks for listening and I will catch you next.

William Hanke (00:00.046)
Today, I’ve got a bowl full of questions. I’m going to pull them out one by one and we’ll talk through them. It’s time for another episode of marketing pains. The podcast about marketing for window treatment and awning companies. Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing Panes. The podcast where we dive into real marketing conversations for window treatment and awning pros. I’m Will Hanke and today we’re doing something a little different.

So instead of a guest, I’m pulling questions straight out of real conversations I’ve had this year. Some came up during discovery calls, others from pros who are following along and just trying to figure out their marketing. These are real things people want to know whether they’re about to hire or they’re still running things themselves. So today I’ve got a bowl full of questions. I’m going to pull them out one by one and we’ll talk through them. So, all right, I’ve got my fancy Home Depot bucket here, paint bucket.

I were remodeling the bathroom downstairs. So I just thought I’d use this before I filled it with paint. So what I want to do is obviously just pull out some different questions and see what they are, answer them lives. By the way, I’ve got 27 different questions in here that we’ve identified over the course of this entire year that are the most common questions. So, all right, let me just pull one out. See what we got here. How should I deal with negative or low star reviews? All right.

Throw that in the trash. So low star reviews. The first thing that I would do is not reply. So I would write a reply to a one or two star review, but don’t publish it. You need some time to kind of chill and relax and get over that initial anger. So we tend to tell our clients, take a day or two to relax, write the review. And then after those 48 hours or so, go back and rewrite it.

And maybe even consider using chat GPT to help you make it a little bit less angry and a little bit more factual. I think people respond well to one star reviews if a very good reply comes along with it. So listen, people understand we’re running a business and sometimes customers just aren’t great. But if you have a great written review, a reply after that, then

William Hanke (02:23.885)
A lot of times that makes people think you’re more real, more legit. And I’ve even heard people comment that 0.8 stars is better than five only because it makes you look more like a real company. So we all have those customers. We all get those kinds of one-star reviews from time to time. Take some time before you reply. Make sure you craft a reply and make sure you do reply for sure, but just, you know, don’t do it fully in anger. Do it very factual.

And hopefully that will actually help your business down the road. All right, let’s grab another one out of here. Put that down. Can I spend $10 a day on Google ads? Sure. I wouldn’t recommend it. That is $300 a month. For our clients, we recommend that they start at $1,500 a month, which is what? 50 bucks a day.

Um, the reason is a couple of things. $300 a month is going to get you one or maybe two leads in a new Google ad campaign. You should expect to pay between 160 and $210 per lead. So by recommending 1500 as a starting point, you should expect to get seven or so leads out of that money out of that spend. If you’re decent at sales and you close four of those seven.

If the average job is, let’s say four grand, that’s about the average for, for a room that’s a $16,000 in revenue for $1,500 spend. Pretty nice return. If you’re spending $300 a day, one of the problems is early on in a Google ad campaign, Google puts you into a learning phase and that learning phase is learning who is going to engage with your ads. Who’s going to convert into an actual customer.

And at $300 a month, when you are getting, let’s just say $200 cost per lead, that one lead per month is not enough for Google. There’s not enough meat on the bone for Google to really do a good job of getting you in front of the right people. If you only want to spend $10 a day, I would probably recommend doing some good SEO on your site, the best you can. We’ve got a great SEO masterclass that you can go through for free.

William Hanke (04:47.053)
and then run Facebook retargeting ads. So basically people that have already been exposed to your brand in some way, you can follow them around on Facebook, probably have a hard time spending $10 a day on retargeting ads on Facebook. That’s probably where I would put my money. if you want to do Google ads, you’re going to need to be spending closer to that 40, $50 a month or a day, which sounds horrible, but.

Listen, if you can put a dollar in and $10 comes out, how many dollars do you want to put in? Now the other piece to that is the cost per lead doesn’t stay at that 160 to 210. If we can drive that cost per lead down to 150, 140, even a hundred dollars or lower, that would be fantastic, right? We’re not asking you to spend more money, but you’re getting more leads for the same spend. So that’s a better approach.

Than just trying to spend a couple hundred bucks a month on Google ads probably save that money and put it elsewhere Alright next question. Is it better to do SEO or ads first? So good aunt good question the Correct way to do this is you need to start on SEO right away And I saw one of the other questions in the bucket that was how long does SEO take SEO can take eight months nine months twelve months to really start to gain momentum

And depending on how many other people in your town are also doing SEO, you know, that could really stretch out. So you have to run ads while you’re working on your SEO. Both of these have to work in tandem. Ads are going to get the phone to ring now. SEO is going to get the phone to ring later. The idea is as your SEO really starts to gain momentum, maybe you can pull some of that ad budget back.

or divert some of that ad budget to next door or Facebook or Instagram, some of these other places and just really start to increase that momentum as things go on. But they really need to work together. All right. Let’s grab another question. Let’s see what we got here. How much time do I need to invest each month into a valuable marketing campaign?

William Hanke (07:01.299)
So this depends on if you’re able to hire a company to do it. If you’re able to hire a company like mine to do your ongoing marketing, you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time working with the marketing company monthly strategy calls or quarterly strategy calls. Make sure that everybody is working in the same direction is always a great thing. after initial onboarding and sign up, which can get a little time intensive, ongoing can be pretty small.

Now, if you’re not able to hire a marketing company, then it really just comes down to how much time can you put in? You’re busy running a business, which takes a lot of your time. Do you also have time to do the marketing piece of that as well? We provide a lot of resources to help people with that so that you can get to the point where you can actually hire a marketing company like us. But early on, it’s a lot of guerrilla marketing.

getting out there and pounding the pavement, optimizing your site, getting a well-built ad library going. There’s a lot of moving pieces to it, but it is very possible to do yourself. It’s just going to require a lot of time outside of actually running your business as well. It just depends on what that trade-off is. Is it better to spend that money and have somebody doing that? If you have that revenue, obviously, if you don’t have that revenue, then it’s a pretty much a no brainers.

All right, let’s grab another one. this is a short one. What is geofencing? So geofencing is basically drawing a fence around a specific physical area on the globe and showing ads to that area. An example could be, let’s say you got a budget blinds in town and you want to run ads to people that are in their parking lot.

Is it the best use of your spend? Probably not because if somebody has already gone to budget and decided that’s where they’re going to go or Home Depot or Costco or wherever, most likely that’s where they’re going to make their decision, right? If they suddenly see an ad for ABC blinds in town, they’re probably not going to engage with that business. So maybe not the best use of your money, but you know, if you can get it really cheap, there’s, can run geofencing.

William Hanke (09:19.867)
ads without, you know, without issue, but that’s what it is. Basically just drawing a, a, not really a square drawing some sort of shape around a location and showing ads specifically in that location. All right. Let’s see what we got next. Do next door ads work. So about maybe close to a year ago now next door revamped their ad platform. Prior to that, it was pretty sketchy.

Wasn’t great, but the revamp that they did really up, up to their game on the ad side of things. So do they work? Yes, they work fantastically. You can really dial down on subdivisions, zip codes, very specific areas that you want your ads to show. And you can get pretty direct with those. We have a lot of clients that obviously start with Google ads. Maybe they’ll add Facebook ads as a secondary or.

Yelp or Nextdoor as that secondary where they really just want to gain more momentum. I would not recommend Nextdoor as the first piece of your strategy. Google ads is pretty much always that piece, but Nextdoor ads do work. You can get very local. You can get very specific on affluent parts of your town, those sorts of things, and really reach out to the right.

clientele. I think the bigger jobs are in those, you know, more affluent areas typically or new construction, those types of things. But yes, absolutely. They do work. So, all right, let’s pull another one out of here. Is it worth signing up for online directories? Yes. So online directories, business type directories are a fantastic citation related tool. And one of the things that Google looks at

In order to rank people in the Google maps area is the amount of citations they have. Citations are mentions of your business around the web where it lists your name and your address and your phone. Typically those things, it might add a link to your business, but it might not. Google smart enough to know if name, address, and phone match that they’ll actually count that as a link for your business. So the more online directories that you can get listed on.

William Hanke (11:41.96)
the better off you are. Now the more relevant, meaning industry related or local related business directories that you can be on, those are even better because they send signals to Google about who you are, but also that you work in this specific area. So those are fantastic. Now we actually have an online directory called America’s best window treatments. That is a fantastic place to get your business listed. It has been.

noted as a citation source in a lot of things, including chat GPT. So we have clients or we have customers now that are going to chat GPT, typing in who is the best window treatment company near me and chat GPT. Those language models are using citation sources to make those decisions and recommendations.

for the best company near this person, this searcher. Absolutely. Business directories are a great place to start. A couple ideas there. So we use brightlocal.com as the source for building citations and monitoring those citations. There’s also Yext. Y-E-X-T is fairly popular. There’s one called Moz Local, M-O-Z Local. And one of the best well-known ones is out of Canada. It’s called Whitespark.

Whitespark.ca. Cool thing about Whitespark is you can go and type in like what you do, window treatments, and then you can put your area and it will find you a lot of local business directories that you can add yourself to. Now, in addition, obviously joining the chamber, the BNI, if any of those list you on their sites, those are great ways of getting additional very local citations. And another way to do that is Little League Sponsorships.

Sites like that where you’re typically donating money in exchange for some sort of sponsorship. Those tend to work really well, although a lot of times they expire after a season or a certain amount of time. All right. Next question. Are trade shows worth it or a waste of time? So trade shows, home shows, those sorts of things. Most of our clients do these in their local town, their local home show.

William Hanke (13:55.513)
And absolutely worth their time. In most cases, they’re not terribly expensive to get a booth at these shows. is a great brand exposure play. If you have something there that you can give away, let’s say a brochure or something, maybe a little nicer than just a flyer. But if there’s something you can give away where people will be able to reference that at a later point, I think those are all great options. And again,

a great brand exposure play more than lead generation. It’s just another opportunity for you to stay top of mind. Now on the other side of that is trade shows where you’re going to the sun shading expo for, for instance, and looking at all the vendors that are offering services for your business. These are great to go to as well. If you’re looking for new vendors.

If you’re looking to upgrade some of the things that you offer, maybe add some new lines in. course, these are great places to go. Everybody’s in one spot. You can have those conversations. You can learn more about their products. A lot of times you can see their products. You can play with their products. You can ask questions to their reps or to their salespeople about how the products work. And then of course, get pricing all of that as well. So absolutely worth going and checking out.

A lot of our clients will go every two to three years, it seems like, and they’ll usually time it around when the trade show is a little closer. So travel is not as expensive. For instance, we’ll be at the Sun Shading Expo here in November. I think it’s November 5 through 7. And that is a fantastic show. If you’re wanting to look for new vendors related to window treatments, awnings.

exterior shading. All of those are going to be in one place at this show in Indianapolis this year. Very excited to be at the show. And if it’s centrally located this year, which is really nice. So if you’re looking for an opportunity to go to a trade show, that’s probably the best one that you can go to right now. I’ll put a link to that in the description below at sunshadingexpo.com. All right. Let’s finish up with one more question here. I’m going to choose.

William Hanke (16:11.784)
this one. What sort of report should I expect from a marketing agency? Great question. So at the end of the day, the best report is again, as I mentioned earlier, you put a dollar in and $10 came out. That’s a great report, right? You know that things are working. Now that’s pretty generic because you need to get a little bit more specific about maybe you put a dollar in one

program and $20 came out, you put it in another program and no money came out, right? So you still want to see some sort of lead source report that shows by lead source, how many leads are we getting? How many of those are turning into opportunities and how many of those are we actually closing? And having that information by lead source is really going to help you with strategy and show you, you know, we put money into Google ads.

And we got this out, we put money into Facebook retargeting. We got this out. We put money into some door hangers and this is what we got out of that. So having all that tracking in place and then looking at it by source is really the ultimate goal for you to know what’s working, what to do more of and what maybe not to do more of as well. That is probably the best report that we provide for our customers.

because it is the one that tells them if it’s working or not. The average customer needs around 12 touches before they engage with a business. 12 touches is a lot of touches. So maybe you’re running Facebook ads and maybe you’re boosting a post on Facebook and they see you as they’re scrolling through. They might not engage with that, but just the fact that you’re staying top of mind because they scrolled past you on that.

That does count and it should get some attribution at the end of the day towards creating that final sale. However, typically we only are able to track the first attribution, the first touch point with a business and, or the last one, the last thing they did before they actually set the appointment. But in reality, there’s a lot of other pieces in between there that you don’t get. sometimes those lead source attribution reports are not a hundred percent accurate.

William Hanke (18:28.444)
but should still give you a decent idea. If you’re running things like call tracking on your Google business profile and on your Facebook ads and your Google ads, you’ll be able to directly tell that this phone call came because of this platform. So that’s nice. But again, there were probably touches before that that helped encourage that person to decide to reach out to you. Lots of different ways you can go about this. And you should be doing a lot of these things.

It’s just hard to be able to do all of these things and know that they’re working or not working. So cost per lead is probably another report item that we always report on because at the end of the day, that’s what clients want to know. How much did I spend to acquire leads this month? And what was the conversion rate for those leads? So I could have got a hundred leads, but if they were really bad quality, I only closed three of them.

That’s not as great as getting 25 leads and closing 50 % of them. Right. So it doesn’t just count on eyeballs or impressions on your brand, but more importantly cost per lead. How much did it cost you to actually get a lead? And then did they convert into actual business actual signed proposals? All right. If any of these questions sounded familiar, you’re not alone.

These are the things that window treatment pros are really asking and talking through them helps them make smarter decisions about where to spend their time and money. If today’s episode gave you something useful, share it with another business owner in the trade. And don’t forget to follow Marketing Panes for more practical straight shooting marketing advice. Thanks for listening and I will catch you next.