Your home services business is growing — congratulations!
You’re no longer a one-man-brand or only running a few trucks. You should be getting ready to hit breakthrough.
And yet, the bigger your business gets, the harder it is to “feed.”
Sometimes it feels like you spend more time worrying about demand calls than anything else.
If that’s you, you might be suffering from Feed the Beast-itus.
Symptoms of Feed the Beast-itus
Common Symptoms include:
- You’ve had double-digit growth the last few years, but have serious concerns about sustaining that growth rate.
- Pay-Per-Crack is killing you — and you desperately need more of it! The prices are going up, because everybody else is doing PPC now, so it’s not working like it used. to.
- You hate — but are still signed up for — every digital lead source available.
- You wake up thankful that today is OK, but you’re already fretting over rest of the week. You wish you had more control over this key “fuel” for your business.
- There’s no positive momentum. You get wins, but every new day starts at zero and it’s back to filling those boards.
- You’ve rock-bottomed tune-up and maintenance prices because you’re using them as a lead source. Worse, your average ticket price is too low — the tune-ups aren’t “converting”!
- You’re undecided on diagnostic charges. You’d like to eliminate them, but running too many zero dollar sales calls is killing you.
- You know selling memberships is key, but you can’t crack the code on how to do it.
All of these symptoms point to the same problem — you are trying to manually feed your growing business by hand.
And the hungry beast just never stops needing more.
Yet you know that some businesses seem to “feed themselves.”
There are companies that are two to three times your size in the market and their owners don’t seem to scramble for demand calls like you do.
The Solution to Getting Off Pay-Per-Crack and Creating the Steady Lead Flow You Need
When you wait for someone to need your service, and then react to their immediate need by bidding on keyword searches, you are essentially gambling.
You put your money into the digital slot machine and hope something good comes out.
And the bigger your business, the bigger your bets, and the harder it is to get lucky all the time.
You’re also placing the future of your business into someone else’s hands. Mostly Google’s.
In sharp contrast, when you advertise to the masses before they need what you sell, you pro-actively win the sale before it ever happens.
You want those prospects searching on your name — not generic industry terms — when they need what you sell.
When that happens you win, and everyone else loses.
The customer is no longer coming to you by chance. They’re coming by choice. No gambling required.
Now your beast of a business has a steady diet of high quality leads.
And customers that come to you by choice are happy to pay a premium price for you — and everything that you offer and stand for — rather than someone else.
Combine that with an already-established reputation for your people, and you’ll start to see in-home sales improve too, with more people opting for “better” and “best” options.
And you don’t need me to tell you fatter profit margins are a good thing.
But there’s something even more profound that happens when you move from reactive to proactive marketing…
Building Brand Momentum and Transforming Your Business Into a Self-Feeding Beast
When you use mass media to bond with customers, you build momentum.
Pay per click is strictly transactional. People forget it immediately after clicking.
But once people form positive associations with your brand — once they feel as if they know you and what you stand for — those associations not only last, they continue to build for as long as you run your campaign
And the more those customers think of you first and feel the best about you when they need what you sell, the more demand calls just come flooding into your business.
All without starting at zero and having to grind away at filling your board.
Your business will be essentially feeding itself. Only your competition will fear it as a ravenous beast.
You’ll have more time to work on your business than in it.
And your empire building dreams will become a certainty rather than a hope.
Others May Have Told You Mass Media Branding Is Expensive & Slow. If They Only Knew…
More than a few Direct Response gurus have claimed that mass media branding doesn’t work or is ineffective.
However, dozens of Wizard of Ads clients have grown from $3-$5 million on-the-cusp companies to over $20, $30, and up to $80 million market dominators using this strategy.
But to give you full confidence, let’s look at the numbers and see how the math pencils out.
Of course, mass media does have a barrier to entry. You do have to be big enough to afford it. But if you’re suffering from Feed the Beast-itus, you’re big enough.
In fact, it’s your size that’s making the symptoms worse. You’ve outgrown the ability to fuel the business purely with digital PPC.
And once you can afford mass media, it’s an order of magnitude CHEAPER than ppc.
Instead of reaching a customer for, say, $10 per click, you can reach them three times a week, every week of the year for under a dollar per person.
Moreover, as long as most people eventually DO buy what you sell, reaching the masses is never wasteful.
Of course, you won’t want to quit your Pay-Per-Crack addiction cold turkey. And we’d never ask you to do that.
We’ve got an established transition plan to move you from where you are now to where you want to be. No withdrawal symptoms necessary.
The reality is that it takes about a year to fully make this transition.
But it’s like any other worthwhile change — the law of seed time and harvest applies.
If you start working out now, several months from now you’ll be in great shape. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it will happen.
Similarly, you can start branding now, and have hit breakthrough in eight to twelve months. Just make sure you work with a team that understands how to brand non-sexy, “Ugly Duckling Businesses”
Or you can let that time go by and find yourself still suffering from Feed the Beast-itus.