Can you make more money by pulling back on your marketing?
If I had a nickel for everytime a contractor from up north asked me this… I’d at least have a pocket full of nickels. :). Roofers, concrete contractors, landscapers… all of ’em.
Save money? I suppose but is your business goal to save money or to make money? We answer that emphatically in this episode.
Join Pat & Angie as they walk through a question asked by a podcast viewer on this new podcast style. Not only are we doing interviews but we are adding to our episodes by including Q&A with P&A (Pat and Angie), as well as going over our “Core 4” that helps us succeed in business and life and keep disciplined and working towards our goals. We call it F.L.I.P. your life!
Fitness, Lifestyle, Impact, and Profit. We work on each one every day and so should you.
Join in and ask us questions and maybe we’ll answer yours on the air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcRrPffESl0
Pat Cherubini – Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everybody, it’s Pat and Angie. I looked in my camera.
Angie Cherubini – Speaker 2 (00:06):
It’s the only time you’ve ever looked where I pointed in your life.
It’s, it’s welcome to Local Vibes, guys, and it’s been, gosh, when was the last time we had Heath?
Oh, that’s been a few weeks ago. We’ve both been sick and we’ve had other things family happen. So that was our official relaunch and we petered out and now we’re going to relaunch again. This is about the fourth time, but we have some plans we want to share with you and tell you what we’re doing, where we’re going and why. It’s going to be a little bit different now, but it’s also going to be a lot more frequent
And I think more fun. It’ll be, we’re still going to have the interviews with the business owners that use our CRM and we’ll probably sprinkle in there some other business owners too, that has
Leaders, entrepreneurs, anybody. Yes,
We’re going to do a q and a with p and a questions and answers with us because we get a lot of questions about different things that comes through email and texting and social media. And so we’re going to address a lot of those. A lot of those things. The four pillars of marketing. This is something that we’ve been teaching, oh my gosh, we’ve been teaching for years, for years. We have a course on it. It’s something that is important. It’s what we do. It’s what we try to teach other people to do.
We use a blueprint, you can download that for free right there. Local vibes, us slash blueprint, and it’s basically a checklist of the way we run our business, the way we run our client’s business, and the way that we’re going to teach you how to run your business if you’re open to it. So it’s free. Jump in, there’s a free course, it’s going to come with that. It’s not quite done yet, but it’s going to be basically walking you through how to set up online marketing for a local business.
And then the final category or section of the podcast is the flip
And this is something actually, gosh, we started something like this, right when we first started the podcast. It was called Flip Flop Your Life. So it is morphed and evolved. And now
This has come from mentors of mine and I can trace ’em back. The one I’m following right now is Sean Whalen. He’s got Core four. He calls it other something different. It’s not fitness, it’s passion. What
Is it? What is it? Honey,
Power, passion, production, and purpose. There you go. That’s what he is. Same basic thing. But he got his from Garrett J White. Garrett J White got his from Kevin Nations. Kevin Nations got his from Stephen Covey,
Who’d Ryan Stewman get his from
Kevin Nations. Really? So it’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs teach and it’s the four core things that you got to do every day to have a better life. Ours is, did Jerry say it?
I said the flip. And it represents fitness, lifestyle, impact and profit. And that can be in your business as well as in your personal life. So we’re going to address all four of those topics.
And we are a business podcast, but we a hundred percent believe fitness. The more fit you are mentally and physically, the better business you can have your impact. This is our lifestyle. Lifestyle is what you do. That’s my family. That’s is the why that we do it. Lifestyle is
Family fun, your vacations, the things that you get to do because of your business, and it needs to be higher on the list than just profit. So the impact is you impacting others, but also being impacted by others. So we kind of follow the leaders and we try to bring other people that want help from us. And nobody is above anybody. It’s just who’s
We toyed around with impact or influence and we’re like, which one should it be? But I think now influence.
Influence almost negative.
So we like to impact because you can impact people and then people can impact you and just spread the
Love. And then the last, the P is profit. Everybody wants more of that. So that’s what we’ll talk about a lot. That’s our favorite thing to talk about. The Local Vibes podcast is about a lot of business. We help business owners. Our business is literally helping business owners get more business. So we’re going to teach how to do that.
Times. There’s going to be a lot of it for free right here. We’re going to share what we know. If you need help, I’ve got a good idea where you can find some. So
Well, today’s topic is going to be more of a q and a with p and a, because literally this has hit us big time in the past week or week or two. And it’s because it’s the where we are originally located or where we are located is north, it’s in Ohio. And so we have seasons and a lot of our clients are seasonal
Those that are out or are seasonal at times, actually not for very long if they really sit down and look at it.
So the question is, should I pause my marketing in the off season? The answer is
And just so you know, we do cuss and we will cuss. So if you don’t like it,
Don’t cuss on purpose, but it’s the way that we speak and it mean it makes it mean what I mean. So we will just get that out of the way right now. Should you pause your season? Should you pause your marketing in the season? No. Get that. Should you pause your marketing for your off season? Fuck no. It’s got more power to it. So that’s why I cuss. So that is what that means. So why would anybody think they could just stop marketing?
Oh, I hear it all the time. Even in the dead of winter, because they want to save money. All of the businesses, not all of the businesses, but a lot of the businesses that we work with or that we talk to, they immediately get this fear that they’re coming into the winter. So, oh my gosh, I need to cut back in every little way possible. And they just, excuse me, they completely get this fear that goes through them. And immediately marketing and advertising are what they cut first because they think people aren’t looking at ’em and people aren’t thinking about it.
Just like in your home life using coupons and getting discounts and do that, you can cut a hundred percent of your expenses that will never, ever make you rich. You need to be using this time to take ground to grow, because number one, all of your competitors are doing the same thing. You’re thinking they’re pulling back, they’re retracting and they’re going to sit there and do nothing. And this is the time that you should be using to remove friction from your current website and your process, your system, your marketing. You can add emails that don’t have to go out until June if that’s what you want. You can add
Schedule things on social media, get
The reviews that you’ve been too busy to ask for all summer long
And people don’t care. I mean, probably a lot of you have CRMs that you work with, relationship managing software. You don’t have to have it to do this. You can send people, you’re flipping Google reviews link and
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Even though maybe you, maybe, let’s say you’re an excavator and maybe you did work back in March for somebody, it doesn’t hurt to reach back out and ask them for a review. Let them know you’re trying to reach more people and a review from them would help you tremendously. So don’t be afraid to ask. You have to ask. Unfortunately, we have to ask for good reviews. People don’t just need good
Reviews. Well, there’s always the saying that if you do a good job for somebody, they may tell somebody about it. If you do a bad job, they’re going to tell 15 people, which now it’s even more than that because they’re going to give you a bad review. They’re going to make shit up. And so this is when you go back and go through your jobs that you’ve done this summer. If you are seasonal, if you’re not seasonal, you should never stop marketing. But this is when you just simply reach out. It’s the holidays. Thank you for your business. You can take your time and contact these people. Is there anything you need? Let me know. Ask for referrals. This is all marketing. Most local small businesses that we talk about, what’s their number one form of marketing? What do every one of them say? Word
Mouth. Word of mouth. This is how you get more word of mouth. You actually go and talk to the people that have the mouths that you want the words from. Go and ask them if they know anybody else that would want ’em. Maybe it’s not till spring. You get ’em on your books, you start sending ’em information, and then the number one thing you should be doing is what we’re doing right now, and it’s adding value. You just tell people about who you are, why you do what you do. We’re going to have a seven day challenge. You don’t even know about this yet, but it’s going to be in our new group seven day video challenge. It’s going to tell people why, where and what you’re doing and get people to know you. Get you to stop being afraid to be on video and reach out and build a better relationship with your customers. Build
Build a list whether you have a CRM or not. Start building a list. Start looking. I know that most of you business owners, you have QuickBooks or FreshBooks or something like that that’s building a list. You send out invoices through that. You have a list of people there that have their name, their phone number, their email address, export ’em. You can export ’em. GTS that which means Google that shit. You can Google it and find out exactly how You can export a list. Whether you use something like ours, Justine, the lead machine, or you use any other third party provider. It’s not
Anybody can import it list now, or you can just put it in a spreadsheet and type up handwritten emails. Probably the best. If you’re so slow, then you’ve got time to do stuff like this.
But honestly, we talk about this, that around here, up north, and I don’t care where up north you are. They say they’re seasonal, but how many months is that really? Because we talked to Heath and he’s a roofer, which everybody thinks that that is definitely seasonal, which it
Definitely does Slow down. It
Slows down. But what he said, they still did one in, yeah,
It’s 40 degrees. I mean, our winters have been pretty mild lately, but if there’s a big ice storm, the first thing that happens on roofs is the gutters. You get an ice dam and the water goes up because the ice expands into under the shingles and leaks and causes damage that needs to be repaired. So if somebody has that happen and they go and look for a roofer and you are kicked back because you don’t think you need to market in the off season, they’re going to find somebody that is marketing in the off season. Obviously you don’t need to be spending a ton. You can pull back, but if you stop marketing and all of your business stops, then you don’t have a very strong business. True. You need to be putting out value. So when somebody, we were saying roofer, if somebody’s roof leaks, there’s a good chance that whoever is the one that is out in the market year round, providing value, educating clients, adding people to their list, emailing them, wishing them happy, Thanksgiving over and over and over again, that leak that they have in the roof, they’re going to probably think of you first.
Oh, what about over right before Thanksgiving? Of course our garage door breaks. Of course, something major always has to happen, and we’re lucky that one of our clients slash neighbors is right down a couple doors down, but he came down and fixed it for us, and we learned something new from him about the springs that he make. What does he do?
He taught me four or five different things about garage doors, which I didn’t know. Push the button. It goes up. That’s what I know
Well, and all this stuff that, and you can go on, but the thing is, is the stuff that Pat’s going to tell you, that’s something that could go out in an email to your list.
The education that he gave me about his trade garage doors, he knows everything about it, but nobody else knows that. He knows that he’s well-spoken guy, good looking guy. Put the phone up. Hey, did you know this about garage door springs? That’s value. Put that on your website. Huge value. Put that on your social media Facebook page. Put that on your Facebook profile. People know you for what you do, and you’re going to see that’s what we’re doing. Follow us. We’re going to follow. We’re going to show you how it’s done. So we’re going to be in your face,
And if you are a client of ours on Justine, the lead machine, you can do these sort of things automatically. You guys could take December if that is your slow time. You could take December and you could schedule out posts that are going to go on your social media with a social media planner. You could do it in one day. One day. You could do that and schedule it out for the whole month or schedule it out for two months and that could be taken care of.
So I’ve got a quick story about one of the many people that reached out about this. Doesn’t matter who he is, but this is the same thing that happens over and over again. And this is how I feel like your marketing, the thought that you’re even thinking about it is a mindset issue. The marketing mindset is different. It is not just boost an ad and you’re going to get money. That’s very rare. It’s getting rarer by the day. We just got done with black Friday week, the ads go up, cost of ads go up because you’re getting big businesses that are running more ads because this is when they make their money. So it’s harder for the little guy. We get two things. We get people that say, well, I don’t want to bug my customers. I want to send one email a month.
And honey, what’s the percentage of people that actually open that?
So if you make a post, I’m beating a dead horse here. We talk about this all the time. If you make a post on your Facebook page right now, the last thing I heard was about 3%. So if you only got a hundred followers, three people are going to see that post.
What about if you email them,
Email a good open rate? Well, not even open rate. If you email somebody, sometimes they go to spam. That just happens. But most people are going to see that you email them, number one, whether they open it or not, binging if they open it, which is about 20 to 30% average. If you get good at providing value, it could be 40 to 50% open it. So almost everybody sees it. That’s a hundred percent. Marketing is about how many touches it takes before somebody’s ready to buy at any time. Most people aren’t ready to buy, but that’s what advertising is. It’s getting to know them. So the story I was going to say, we have clients that have the wrong mindset. They come in, they’re not sure that they want to do marketing because they only do word of mouth or they’ve tried it and it didn’t work, or any of the a hundred things that they tell us it’s too expensive.
They come in and they want a discount. So the first problem is that is you’ve got to discount mine. So just the way I believe the world works, if you’re asking for discounts, you’re going to attract people that want discounts. That’s the way it works. True. So not always bad, but that’s just a mindset thing. Marketing mindset. If you’re not willing to pay full price for marketing, you’re probably not going to get full price in return. So we gave this person a discount. We drove leads. They didn’t answer the phone. Over and over and over and over. We have tracking and we
We can see it. What was happening is it went to their voicemail. Nobody answered it. They went to their voicemail. This was only one month. There were a couple dozen phone calls, and I believe one person left a voicemail.
Nobody leaves voicemail anymore.
Nobody leaves. Voicemails
Don’t answer. Why? Because they know that they can go to the next person in
Line, the next person, they don’t answer the phone. They’re going to the next person in line. So of the ones they did get phone calls that they did answer, which wasn’t very many. We also had web forms. That’s the main lead. The complaint was too many of them wanted quotes.
People were just calling to ask for quotes. We don’t need to say what this was, but it’s a trades business that
Well, and if you’re good at your trade, just getting a lead doesn’t mean it just stops there. If you’re good at it, you upsell. Yeah,
Getting leads is not completing a sale. If we’re completing sales for construction business like that, I
So they complained that too many just wanted a quote, and they literally said, I want the phone calls from the people that have a hundred thousand dollars to spend and are ready to go. What the fuck? So does everybody else. It doesn’t work that way. You’ve done nothing but sit back and wait for word of mouth, but you want a hundred thousand dollars phone calls from one month of marketing. So it doesn’t work that way. They ended up quitting. It wasn’t for them. It was on good terms. They didn’t like it. They didn’t think it was valuable enough. Weather just changed. Seasons have switched and it slowed down, and we get a message, Hey, can we flip that back on? I need commercial jobs.
No, it doesn’t work that way.
That doesn’t happen very often, guys. We don’t like to say no, but
That’s friend of mine, longtime client. Love him. Bad mindset. Go do what you’ve been doing. If you’re doing fine, waiting for word of mouth, go wait for word of mouth. But you cannot expect to be able to just turn this off and on. It’s a constant system. And there are four pillars. They all work together. The simple is website, marketing, sales, and ads, and they all work together. And you can’t do the ads until you have the first three working together.
And you guys, we are able to talk about this because we have helped
Hundreds of people. We have helped big clients. We’ve helped people actually sell their business for millions based on the stuff that we teach and that we do.
Still waiting on this commission check. I
Know we probably didn’t set ourselves up correctly for that, but no equity. It felt good. It felt great. It definitely made me feel good to know. Gosh, we’ve done this many times. It makes us feel really good to know that the stuff that we did actually helped these businesses, either or These people and friends of ours either sell or expand, and that’s a great feeling. But the big key is that they listened to us. They did what we said to do or allowed us to do what we know needs to be done to be successful on it.
So that wraps up what our feelings are of should you pause your marketing in the slow season. So
Do it if you want. We’re just here to help. We do have some coaching coming up. We’re getting ready to really go hard, and I have this drive in my belly that I need to teach more people.
I’ve had it for a long time. The reason I wanted to get that F word out in the beginning is because I want to repel people that are worried about that. I want people to come to us that aren’t bothered by that, that are a little bit more aggressive, aren’t worried about sending more than one email per day or per month, and that are genuinely open to getting coached on how to grow their business. So if that’s you, we’re going to have some coaching available. It’s going to be super cheap. Comment below if you want some information. It’s not quite ready, but it’s damn close. And I’ve kind of said, I’m ready to start screaming at people. So if that offends you, it may not be for you, but I want to tell you what I think you should do. Whether you do it or not, is up to you.
If you want the we’re there.
Yeah. So I’ve been a coach, youth sports coach. So
Beanie. Coach Beanie. The way I’ve finally, we try to help people so much, and if they don’t like it, we try to figure out what they would do, coaching them to grow their business. We’re trying to make ’em fricking money. I mean, it’s crazy. But I finally remembered when I coached, I was a varsity lacrosse coach. I didn’t play lacrosse in school. I had no idea. I had to learn how to do this. So I had to literally learn how to do what I was going to teach. I had to find skills and drills to learn how to do it so I could teach it. I then would teach it. I then would help others do it, and then I would finally get them into the game where they had to do it. At no point, just like my coaching for businesses and websites and marketing, I cannot make you do it. We cannot force you to do what we tell you, but we can set you up that the people that are willing to do a little bit and learn a little bit, ask for help when they need it. Those are the people that are going to thrive. Those are the people I’m ready for.
Angie’s quote, we’re going to have a counter of, yep. So do you have anything else? Yep.
Just don’t say. Yep. I like it when you agree with me.
No, I don’t have anything else to say. I think we nailed it.
So this was a q and a. We’re going to have more things coming up. If you have any questions, ask ’em in the comments. Message Jammas.
Maybe one of these times we’ll do a live q and a with p and
A. We’re going live q and as. We’re always looking for interviewees. Oh yeah. Any successful local businesses, whether you’re a client or not. We want to talk. We love hearing the stories.
We do have one coming up on Friday. Friday A with kipp.
So I think that’s it. Yep.
Peace out. Show Full TranscriptShow less
