Marketing Outside of D2D

Digital Marketing

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is “what do you do for advertising outside of door-to-door sales?”

Obviously, we have a heavy emphasis on D2D because that’s where our background is and because it has proven to be sensational for our growth. We do run digital ads and have tried almost every form of marketing we can think of. I will rank them in terms of our ad spend this year.

Google CPC Ads

Nothing special. We currently don’t have a team running ads for us. We use Google performance max and follow their recommendations. Are we truly maximizing results by doing it ourselves? Probably not, but these ads have done really well for us and the money we save by running the campaigns for ourselves is currently worth it for us with our current ad spend. In the future, I am sure we will outsource. For now, it has been working great.

Google LSA

If we could spend more here, we would. We have an LSA budget set for $2500 a month and we never max it out. There just isn’t enough LSA volume in our market. Our average lead through LSA is about $50 and we close a vast majority of LSA calls. If we could spend $10k a month on LSA we would in a heartbeat if they gave us enough volume.

Radio

Surprising to see radio so high on the list, right? Well, we aren’t currently on the radio and don’t plan on being on it in the future. We were spending $1000 a month last year on radio and we didn’t get a single call from it. Not one person mentioned they had heard our ads, and it didn’t really seem to boost brand awareness all that well when we were knocking doors. We changed up our ads, ran different offers, and even tried to give away free services and the phone would not ring. Overall, I would give the radio a 0/10.

HomeAdvisor (Angi Leads)

HomeAdvisor gets a lot of hate. I get it. They are super pushy. They call us all the time telling us to open our service range, increase the services we offer, and to try to sell us different services. They were exceptionally painful to deal with after we had signed up and created a profile with them but had not yet started services fully. They called several times a day trying to get us to start. Since then, they have been great. We close almost every lead that comes through HomeAdvisor and lead cost is very reasonable at about $40 a lead. We are one of the only companies in our market that use Angi. Also, when we signed up, we got a backlink on their website which has been huge for our SEO.

Meta Ads

Meta ads in general are pretty bad for us. We have tried running multiple different campaigns over the years with lackluster results. We even outsourced this year to have a professional do it. No results.

We do run one campaign a year. There is a specific bug – the elm bug- that hatches every year in several states in late June. The town gets completely overrun for about a month and people lose their minds. We spend about $2000 on a single campaign that lasts a few weeks and the phones ring like crazy. Our first year running the ad we spent $1000 and had generated $15,000 in recurring revenue in one week. Not a bad return at all.

Thumbtack

Many people have not heard of Thumbtack. It is almost exactly the same as HomeAdvisor but much smaller and a much better reputation. We are the only people using this lead service and because of that our average is lead $9. Yes, $9 and we have a 100% close rate with them. Often, customers pay a premium to instant book through Thumbtack. Just like LSA, if we would spend more through Thumbtack, we would. The only issue is their lead volume is extremely low. Frequently only a sending us a few leads per month.

Direct Mail

We did a direct mail campaign last year and we broke even. We targeted several different areas to do some a/b testing. We sent several rounds of mailers to high-, middle-, and lower-income areas to see if one group was more susceptible to a good deal. We made back the money we spent but we have not returned to do it again. 

Next summer we will likely a/b test again by sending mailers into an area right before our D2D knocks the doors and send mailers to a different area right after our team has ravaged the doors to see if we get any better results. I love the concept; we just haven’t seen the results.

Door Hangers and Yard Signs

On days where are technicians are light on work, we have them run door hangers through mobile home parks. These are the only neighborhoods that are off limits for our D2D crew. The homes are also densely placed so a tech can leave a ton of hangers quickly. We see great returns here, but our techs are often busy enough that we don’t place as much volume as we should.

We have never actually placed yard signs. I placed them for a different company that I ran for a short amount of time. At that company what I found was competitors would see them all over town and quickly rip them down. I had a really hard time keeping them up long enough to get any real visibility.

Referral and Winback Campaigns

We offer all of our customer $50 off their next service when they refer a friend or neighbor. On average, we get 7 referrals a year for every 100 customers we sign up. 

We also send a few texts and emails each year to our past clients and anybody who has received a one-time service previously. We generate a lot of revenue through these wins back campaigns and they cost us almost nothing. Email lists are gold when they are full of the people in your target audience.

SEO

Up until last month, I had been doing all the SEO for our website. I was building links, responding to Google reviews, updating pictures and H1 tags on our website, and learning what I could do better to increase our web presence. We recently just outsourced this to Stryker Digital. We will let you know how it goes. I will say this, SEO works. We have over 800 reviews at our first location with a 4.9 star rating and people call in every day saying they chose us because we had the best reviews in town. Excited to see what the professionals can get going for us.

So, what should your takeaway be from all of this? Test everything. See what works best for you market and your service and be ready to adjust and adapt. I know a lot of companies that do extremely well through Meta ads. It simply hasn’t worked for us. A lot of people think Homeadvisor is a scam. I wish we could spend more with them.

Your market might be saturated with LSA players. That could change in the future. You must be willing to test things out and find what works best for you. If you are seeing a great return, up your budget. If you aren’t, find something better but don’t be afraid to return to old ideas.

Industry News: Massey Services Sponsors the Tampa Bay Bay Buccaneers

You know we reached out to the Denver Broncos to talk about potential pest control sponsorships. The cost was not as bad as I thought it might be. The official bank sponsors are paying well into the 7 figures a year. For a smaller sponsorship, they can start out as little as $200k a year. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a massive number but to be partnered with an NFL franchise, I think that’s pretty awesome. The branding would go a long way as well. A goal I have in the future for sure!